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quality. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. But I should have stood on it, delayed the book further if that’s what was necessary to get it done right.

Gelman: Was this book done on schedule?

Juliette: No it was like six months off schedule.

Gelman: Six months? That’s kind of average.

Juliette: No, it wasn’t years off schedule, but still it was definitely late, and more than being late there was just a certain point at which it just didn’t look like it was ever going to end. It just looked like it was going to go on like that, forever. Where I would be printing stuff out, printing stuff out, printing stuff out, and bringing it down to New York. I was at school in New Haven while I was working on that project. And showing it to him and having him go through the whole thing and change this and change that, and go back and do it again, and again, and again, and I did that probably twenty times. I needed to move on to other things. I really, really like to work very intensely on something for a while and then I just want to be done with it. I don’t want to keep working on it, and this panic sets in that it won’t end, and that’s how the end-stuff, the production work, starts to fall apart. And that work is so critical. The second book I did with Peter, Peter Eisenman, took four years. And the book is on a ten-year span of his work. It just kept going and going and going and it wasn’t ending. I basically stormed out of the book on its last day. Luckily, though, Monacelli had smart production people who saw it through, and did a fantastic job where I really couldn’t. I was just spent. I am grateful for that.

Gelman: You probably feel you are losing a certain objective...

Juliette: Yeah, I actually can’t see any of these books until about a year after it is printed. Then I pick it up and I look at it, and then I can think about it. The one book I really like is that first book, the little diagram book. And there’s so much that’s bad about it too, I didn’t know anything about typography, but I can look at it, appreciate it for what it is, I can see it. And for the projects I’ve worked on recently, or even anything I did in school I still can’t really see it now. It’s still too wrapped up in all these other issues and things. I don’t know. I have to say one of the reasons why I like graphic design is because the life of the projects are short. And if you do something and it’s terrible, it’s just terrible, and you look at it and you say "it’s terrible" and you go and you do the next project. You can just learn from doing you don’t have to just sit there revising the same thing over and over again for all eternity, which is what some of these books turn into, unfortunately. Every one of them has a time too that...

Gelman: The shorter span of the project is probably one of the differences between graphic design and architecture. In that sense it’s really...

Juliette: I can’t imagine working on a building for eight years. It’s also an overworking problem. If you give a kid finger paint and you say make a painting and you leave them there for fifteen minutes they’ll make a great painting, and then if you give them six hours, all they are going to come up with is big brown mush. Which is what happens to some of these projects, too, I think, because they just get boring, they get really bland.

Gelman: True.

Juliette: You have to stop at a certain point. Even if it’s not perfect. I’m not really that concerned about them being perfect, but they can be really good without being perfect.

Gelman: Besides those books, you are also doing a lot of experimentation. Can you talk about that?

Juliette: A lot of it starts with some of the work I did in school but also now that I’m back in the world again, I’ve got a lot of friends, and they all have ideas, and I have ideas, and it’s "Let’s do this together and let’s do that together" so I’ve been chasing some of these rabbits down their holes. Mostly I’ve been looking into doing computational interactive projects, things that react to their environments, as it’s not something that normally shows up in a real project.

Gelman: That’s interesting.

Juliette: A lot of the work I did in school was about reconciling the rational and irrational side of things, of math and literature. I’m a big math fan. It’s a weird problem. And now it’s okay if you’re not working‹when I went to school, it was ’99 and everybody was working like crazy and you never hit the ground, and now it’s fine if you just don’t do anything for a few months for clients. People are fine with that now. You don’t look like a loser, because "oh, it’s just the economy" and it’s giving me a chance to think about, well what is it I want to do and really do something? Like for Christmas, for example, I want to take a trip around the United States by train because right now on Amtrak you can do it for like $200, to just go around the entire perimeter and maybe do some sort of photographic series or something from that to do, but also at the same time I’m really focused right on trying to identify things to collect, I’m just collecting right now. Like eating basically. Just constantly looking at images, or things or projects or ideas and trying to get them all together so I can use them, so there’s a useful archive of all this stuff, and then I can just take the next thirty-five years and just keep taking from that. I don’t know it’s kind of weird to think of things that way. I don’t really approve of it. Like thinking with that much preparation, or whatever. Because the truth is that I’m far more comfortable responding to problems, and the bigger the better. But I do think that when I do have time to stop I do try to figure out, "Well, how do I build up my arsenal? How do I get enough to go on?" this is the time to do it. I’m really excited about those things. I’m really excited about starting some projects and doing some projects, but most of it’s still very nebulous in my head.

Gelman: Do those discoveries, and the things that you find, ever trigger new projects?

Juliette: Oh yeah. For example, I like it because you have this little idea for yourself. Then you get an opportunity to take it in a larger arena. And back. I wear the same color every day and that has made it into my projects more than once. Now a lot of the ideas that went into making the thesis book are going into the book project I’m working on, separating certain things. This is my chance now to show it to like 4,000 people instead of just twenty. Which I think is really important to able to get the feedback.

Gelman: So there is a flow, a certain continuity.

Juliette: There’s a continuity, definitely. You can test things out in a smaller area and then just throw them out with a lot more confidence, of course, and really see what it is, and see if it stands up, and if it’s not just a bunch of stuff that looks good in the dark. It’s fun.