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.