It’s a liberating time to be a graphic designer. You would think so, anyway, after reading Jarrett Fuller’s new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design, published this fall by Princeton Architectural Press. Fuller, a designer, writer, podcaster, and professor at North Carolina State University, makes an optimistic case for an expansive definition of graphic design. Through conversations with practitioners working across publishing, research, changemaking, performance, and artistic practice, he argues that graphic design is much more than the production of posters, logos, and websites.  Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of his podcast, Scratching the Surface, which highlights practitioners overlapping with graphic design, the book turns its attention specifically to graphic designers with expansive, blurry, and very public practices.  [Image: Courtesy Princeton Architectural Press] As fellow design educators, Fuller and I caught up about what this broader understanding of design means for the current generation of graphic designers. As he puts it, graphic designers are inherently insecure about their discipline’s identity and relevance. But rather than trying to resolve that uncertainty, what if we embraced it? We talked about the confidence it takes to define a practice on your own terms, and the possibilities that open up when you do. Below is a conversation we had over Zoom, which was edited for clarity. Nika Simovich Fisher: Congratulations on your book—I really enjoyed the expansive, blurry multidisciplinary model of all of the perspectives. I think it’s important to have an optimistic perspective right now. In class yesterday, I had a sophomore student ask me if, in my opinion, right now is a good time to go into the interaction design field. I thought of your book immediately because it does a great job of encapsulating how design can be part of many different realms, and I responded in that way. But I also did hear her anxiety, and I was curious, h

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