I believe that to be a good designer, one must be a reader. My earliest design education came from the blogs, books, and magazines I discovered as a high school student, before I ever took a design class. Many of the readings included on this site shaped my own understanding and interests in design. One of my goals as a teacher is to shorten the length between practice and theory so I'm constantly recommending readings to my students to help them put their work in a professional and theoretical context. Additionally, my podcast attempts to make design critcism more accessible and my guests are always suggesting their favorite writers. This site serves to bring all of these recommendations together under one roof. It's for students looking to broaden their understanding of design, it's for researchers to find writings on particular subjects, and it's for practicioners looking for obscure and historical texts.
This site serves as a free library of introductory essays, books, and texts on graphic design theory, criticism, and practice as well as related fields like cultural criticism, photography, and architecture. While the goal of is to provide a collection of canonical and important texts on graphic design and related fields, it inevitably contains blindspots and gaps — the selections included here skew to my own personal interests in design and my own education and practice. However, this is not a static archive but will continually be updated in an attempt to both stay current and fill in the gaps. When possible, essays link to their original source and PDFs hosted here are freely assessible elsewhere on the web. To the best of my knowledge, I am not publishing anything new or copyrighted.
Jarrett Fuller is a designer, writer, educator, editor and podcaster. He is director of twenty-six, a multidisciplinary design and editorial studio; hosts the design podcast Scratching the Surface; is a contributing editor at AIGA Eye On Design; and teaches in both undergraduate and graduate programs at Pratt Institute, The New School Parsons School of Design, University of the Arts, and Rutgers University. He previously worked as a designer at Facebook, Warby Parker, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He received his BFA in graphic design from Kutztown University and his MFA in graphic design and critical studies from Maryland Institute College of Art.