Sometimes I will give some very vague directions to the designer that I'm working with on a particular project and they'll come back and surprise me with something that really shows a lot of their own 'hand' in it. Other times I'll have a really clear idea about how I want it done and I'll draw it out pretty precisely and say 'make it look exactly like this' and it will be something where it looks like I can say it was 'fully my design'. The work can also range between the two.

Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.

I actually think it almost works the other way sometimes: making a college textbook, say, look really "user friendly" tends to also make it look less "serious," even if nothing changes other than the design treatment.

I have a really shallow idea about what Australia is.

Australia seems to strike a balance between big and small. It's big enough to have that diversity, but not so big that it disintegrates into something that is not connected.

It was 4 or 5 years into my first design job before the idea of doing graphic design on computers started taking hold. I started working in 1980, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, then the real desktop publishing only started coming around in 85-86, but it wasn't really until the end of the decade that the transition became irresistible.

Certain kinds of typeface design and typographic design are designed to persuade: we can make this company look modern if we use a crisp sans serif typeface, or we can make this restaurant look like its been around forever if we use typefaces and layout styles that have been around forever too. But there are other categories, and ballot design is one of them, where the goal should be to be purely functional. There have been notable failures in this category.