Our founder is lecturing in Japan right now. Tokyo-based PingMag talked with Erik last week and the very detailed interview is up at their site with gobs of illustrations.

PingMag:

What do you think about the increasing possibilities to purchase “cheap design”, done by people claiming to be designers or better opportunities to let software design for you?

Erik Spiekermann:

Good, yeah! There is a market for fast food — I don’t eat it but, there is nothing wrong with it. There are lots of people who are probably well served with it. In fact, the more of that cheap stuff is out there, the higher we get pushed.

Most stuff isn’t even badly designed, it just isn’t designed at all. But the more stuff actually gets designed, it pushes up the demand for design. That’s just what happened to typefaces: before we had maybe 1,500, now we have more than 30,000. The demand is always increasing and the quality will also always increase.