Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of...

Providing tactical strategies and creative support to tackle the complexities of balancing intuition and taste, technical and personal capability, strategic business decisions in design work and the demands of modern brand building, this book speaks to students, educators, and seasoned professionals. Part personal memoir and part professional manual by Matt Owens, A Visible Distance, Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design is a reality check to challenges when building a practice in gra...

This publication emerges from the 2023 London Design Biennale. It involves an international working group facilitated by Delany Boutkan and Setareh Noorani, both researchers at the Nieuwe Instituut, which confronted the intricate and often uncomfortable dynamics of collaboration. Through public sessions and intimate dialogues in London and Rotterdam, the realities of collaboration and collectivity were examined. Two transcripts from the public events are reworked in this publication, along wi...

The Failed Painter is a personal book about material anxiety in Graphic design's creative work. It speaks of fascination for singular and multiple production processes, perfectibility, and imperfectability in times of virtual surface and hunger for authenticity. Writing out of the persona ‘The Failed Painter’, this book is a collection of essays on design and art spanning culture, race, nation, and sheer vandalism from the author of The Impossibility of Silence: Writing for Designers, Art...

Candles is a photographic essay by Tim Onderbeke. Fascinated by the sacred, ritual, and cerebral act of lighting a candle, the artist began collecting images of candles and candlesticks in an artistic or art-historical context. In Candles, Onderbeke uses his own work and that of others to research what he calls “the colour of darkness,” or negative space – a concept he borrowed from the Japanese writer and essayist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Tanizaki describes this intense experience he ha...

Capitalism could not exist without the coins, banknotes, documents, information graphics, interfaces, branding, and advertisements made by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are appropriated to serve economic growth. It seems design is locked in a cycle of exploitation and extraction, furthering inequality and environmental collapse. CAPS LOCK uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are ine...

Now in full-color throughout, the second edition of Packaging Design offers fully up-to-date coverage of the entire packaging design process, including the business of packaging design, design principles, the creative process, and pre-production and production issues. New chapters cover topics related to branding, business strategies, social responsibility, and sustainability. All new case studies and examples illustrate every phase of the process, making this the single most important guide ...

Designing Type is a comprehensive guide to type design is hailed as a 'must-have' for typographers, graphic designers and students and has been fully refreshed and updated with the introduction of more contemporary typefaces, more explanatory diagrams and a closer connection between text and corresponding image.

The new edition of Designing Type also features more in-depth discussion of the processes behind developing typefaces and the basic issues that need to be taken into consideration suc...