In the US you have New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami and dozens of other cities; a few of them have a really strong visual character. But even with those there is just too much space between them and too many people.

I'm not sure about my design work every time.

The scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, "Because I like it."

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

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.

I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.

Australia is one of the few places that I can think of where the cities, at least those I've been to, seem to have strikingly different characters and visual textures. To an American like me, there's basically Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and the rest is all bush.