Summer 2024
A compilation with clout
Why Graphic Culture Matters
By Rick Poynor. Designed by Sara De Bondt. Occasional Papers, £22.
Rare are those who write about graphic design but are not graphic design practitioners or academics themselves. Even more rare are those with enough to say on the subject to spend more than 40 years doing it. It is not an easy challenge since, according to Rick Poynor, graphic design ‘isn’t consumed in the same way as a novel, film or album … Detailed critical interpretation … is simply not required.’ Yet Poynor has found plenty to write about over a writing career that began in the 1980s and continues today.
He has maintained a sustained interest in the subject and attracted an audience observing and analysing ‘design’s meanings, social uses and effects,’ conducting what he calls ‘critical journalism’. His approach to the topic is specific, grounded in an understanding of what makes graphic design worth discussing and in what ways it matters.
What initially drew me to Why Graphic Culture Matters was the title. Thanks to today’s ready availability of tools, creating graphic communications is in everyone’s wheelhouse. The outcome is a blur of similar-looking graphic junk that has saturated every seeming corner of experience …
Louise Sandhaus, educator, author, founder of The People’s Graphic Design Archive, Los Angeles
Read the full version in Eye no. 106 vol. 27, 2024
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.