I think I sort of have a love/hate relationship with a reputation I have for being the designer who works with grids.

I think the way design was practiced for most of the 20th century was very declarative. A designer came up with a solution for a project and put it in place and shipped the solution and it landed in a reader or a customer's hands as a brochure. They would see it as a poster, or as a piece of signage. And that was sort of it. That was the end of it. I think Internet technology has really upended that whole equation because in some ways a designer's work is never really done online.

I think we are in this era right now where every element in a webpage is rendered to within an inch of its life. I think if it's a button, it looks like a physical button, you know, if it's a mailbox that's meant to signal a messaging functionality then the whole mailbox right down to the rivets on the hypothetical metallic housing is rendered.

I think as technology and expertise makes possible these sort of amazing levels of fidelity to the real world, a lot of people sort of get sort of - what's the word I'm looking for - seduced into that. And after a time, they get tired of it and they become a little bit more interested, I think at a certain level of subtraction and a new level of sophistication.

You have this really powerful technological infrastructure that can do really tremendous things. At the same time, it's never going to be as flexible as we'd like it to be. Just by nature of web technology.

The way I look at my job, I spend a lot of time trying to create the conditions for good design to happen and I don't get an opportunity to do a lot of hands on work.

I think there's always something about design that is going to be very difficult for more than a small fraction of people to really get.