Thinking through Graphic Design History

Challenging the canon

Aggie Toppins (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2025
Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Verlag)
978-1-350-32721-4 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Januar 2025)
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Graphic design has a paradoxical relationship to history. While it claims to promote originality and innovation—ideas that emphasize the new and unique—design practice is often deeply embedded in previous ideals. Too often, design students encounter the past in brief visual impressions which seduce them to imitate form rather than engage with historical contexts. Even though it claims objectivity and comprehensiveness, graphic design history focuses largely on Eurocentric achievements and abstract notions of “good taste.”

Yet the past swells with untapped potential. Graphic design history can serve the field of today and tomorrow, but its narratives require updates. History, like design, is always changing - and like design, history is driven by the needs of the present. This book offers ways to engage history, even while transforming it, to inform ethical and intelligent practices. Through this critical guide, Aggie Toppins draws on feminist, decolonial, materialist, and postmodern theories to articulate the links between historiography and historical reference—all in accessible language for a college reader. With thoughtful analyses, stimulating creative prompts, interviews with designers from all over the world, and diverse, inspiring case studies that include authorial projects as well as material interventions and community-based projects, this book challenges our traditional understanding of graphic design history.

Aggie Toppins is an Associate Professor and Chair of Design at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. She writes and practices design at the intersection of critical histories,social justice,and studio-based making.

Introduction
1: (De)Constructing History
1.1 Making History: Methods & Frameworks
1.2 Writing History: Historiography & Narratology
1.3 Designing with History: Common Approaches
2: Appropriating the Past
2.1 Trading in Signs: Postmodernism & Intertextuality
2.2 Flashes in Danger: Redemptive Criticism & Decoloniality
3: Examining Nostalgia
3.1 Memories for Sale: Commodity Nostalgia
3.2 Lingering on Ruins: Restorative & Reflective Nostalgia
3.3 Design is Out of Joint: Hauntology
4: Shaping New Narratives
4.1 Decentering Europe
4.2 Making Publics: Publishing & Curating
4.3 Critical Practices
4.4 Spatial Practices
5: Imagining Futures
5.1 Visualizing Worlds
5.2 Designing Fictions
5.3 Accelerationisms and the Artificial Conclusion
Glossary References

Erscheint lt. Verlag	23.1.2025
Zusatzinfo	150 colour illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	189 x 246 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Design / Innenarchitektur / Mode
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
	Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Grafik / Design
ISBN-10	1-350-32721-2 / 1350327212
ISBN-13	978-1-350-32721-4 / 9781350327214
Zustand	Neuware