Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This authoritative documentary history begins with the poster and goes on to chart the development of word and image in brochures and magazines, advertising, corporate identity, television, and electronic media, and the impact of technical innovations such as photography and the computer. For the revised edition, a new final chapter covers all the recent international developments in graphic design, including the role of the computer and the Internet in design innovation and globalization. In the last years of the twentieth century, at a time when "designer products" and the use of logos grew in importance, the role of graphic designers became more complex, subversive, and sometimes more political--witness Oliviero Toscani's notorious advertisements for Benetton. Digital technology cleared the way for an astonishing proliferation of new typefaces, and words began to take second place to typography in a whole range of magazines and books as designers asserted the primacy of their medium. Designers and companies discussed here include Neville Brody, David Carson, Design Writing Research, Edward Fella, Tibor Kalman, Jeffery Keedy, LettError, Pierre di Sciullo, Tomato, Gerard Unger, Cornel Windlin, and a host of others.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 7)
• From Graphic Art to Design 1890 to 1914
• 1 The Art Poster (p. 11)
• Two-Dimensional Design and Graphic Reproduction
• Information Design Bauhaus Typography
• Photography and Sequence
• Printing Technique and Design
• Colour and Visual Clues
• Production and New Technology
• 2 The Beginnings of Design in Europe (p. 25)
• 3 War and Propaganda 1914 to the 1920s (p. 32)
• The Avant-Garde and the Origins of Modernism 1914 to 1940
• 4 Futurism and Italy (p. 37)
• 5 Soviet Russia (p. 44)
• 6 Germany (p. 52)
• 7 The Netherlands (p. 68)
• National Tendencies until 1940
• 8 Switzerland (p. 76)
• 9 France (p. 83)
• 10 Britain (p. 89)
• The Designer and the Art Director
• 11 The United States in the 1930s (p. 97)
• 12 War and Propaganda 1920s to 1945 (p. 104)
• 13 The United States 1945 to the 1960s (p. 112)
• Variants of Modernism in Europe
• 14 Switzerland and Neue Graphik (p. 130)
• 15 Italy and the Milanese Style (p. 138)
• 16 France (p. 147)
• 17 Northern Europe (p. 155)
• Psychedelia, Protest and New Techniques
• 18 The Late 1960s (p. 179)
• New Waves: Electronic Technology
• 19 The 1970s and 1980s (p. 186)
• 20 From 1990 to the New Millennium (p. 216)
• Bibliography and Sources (p. 224)
• Index (p. 229)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This short volume joins a relatively small group of works documenting the history of graphic design. Along with Philip B. Meggs's A History of Graphic Design (CH, Oct'83), James Craig and Bruce Barton's Thirty Centuries of Graphic Design (1987), and Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast's Graphic Style (CH, Apr'89), this book forms a familiar canon. No new ground has been broken. Most of the graphic representations are found in other texts. The gallery of male graphic design heroes is consistent with that delivered by other graphic design surveys. Women are severely underrepresented, especially before 1975. There are no images by graphic designers who work south of the equator; beyond a short section devoted to recent Japanese work, designs from throughout Asia and the Pacific Rim are excluded, as is most work from Eastern Europe. The male Western-Euro-American emphasis is fostered by the author's decision (not new in this historical genre) to present information as a series of discrete national histories. Little attention is given to the social, cultural, or sociological impact of the images or the image makers. Although it covers the same ground and repeats the errors of its predecessors, this paperbound volume is much less expensive than any other graphic design survey. Created as a textbook, it would be a worthwhile addition only for those libraries that do not contain copies of the other visual surveys of graphic design. General; undergraduate (all levels); graduate; professional. R. M. Labuz; Mohawk Valley Community College