Designer-Authored Histories: Graphic Design at the Goldstein Museum of Design

Abstract

The idea that graphic designers could, and would, create their own histories through their writing, designing, and publishing can be found throughout the twentieth century. Whether documentary, reflective, expressive, critical, self-promotional, comparative, or visionary, designers have harnessed the means of production to state their views in print—a concept and a practice that parallels most of the discipline’s growth and maturity. Jan Tschichold’s influential New Typography, published in 1928, Eric Gill’s polemical book, An Essay on Typography, from 1931, and Willem Sandberg’s Experimenta Typografica books, begun in the 1940s, are just a few early examples that illustrate how graphic designers and typographers have advanced their ideas through self-authorship. On the intellectual heels of deconstruction, semiotics, conceptual art, and postmodernism, and enabled by new technologies for the creation, production, and distribution of designed artifacts, more graphic designers began to produce self-initiated work in the century’s latter decades. However, it was not until the early to mid-1990s that formal theories about design authorship emerged. Among the tenets posited by design authorship’s framers were redefining the design process, opening new avenues for collaboration, building stronger relationships between visual form and literal content, expanding the space for personal expression, creating a greater level of social and political engagement, and finding more opportunities for entrepreneurial ventures. In 1995 and 1996, in particular, Emigre magazine’s issues devoted to “Clamor over Design and Writing,“ the exhibition, Designer as Author: Voices and Visions, held at Northern Kentucky University (Fig. 1), and the Eye magazine article, “The Designer as Author,” fueled the debate.1 When one considers the plethora of commercial graphic design in everyday life, how might a narrowly defined area like design authorship be relevant to the discipline’s study and research? Before trying to answer, some background on the context for a collection of designer-authored histories follows. This essay explores a range of examples of works, held in the Goldstein Museum of Design at the University of Minnesota, that exemplify key moments in the history of graphic design authorship. In addition, selected works will be examined that prompted debates, mainly in the design