Graphic Events: A Realist Account of Graphic Design

by James Dyer (Editor), Nick Deakin (Editor), Johanna Drucker (Afterword)

Essays and interviews on the precarious life of designed objects Once an object of graphic design leaves the designer’s computer, it enters an unpredictable and precarious existence in the world. Posters, packaging and flyers may be ripped from walls, littered on streets or left to fade in shop windows. This chasm between the conception and the material life of designed objects is familiar and apparent to all, but is curiously under-theorized within the discipline.
Graphic Events calls on graphic designers to embrace the uncertainty their designs face as they circulate in the world. It proposes that, rather than ignore the fact or to attempt to “solve” the problem, designers should play with this unpredictable process. This volume contains interviews with and essays by philosophers, graphic designers, photographers and artists, as well as a poem by Philip Larkin and an excerpt from a memoir by Patti Smith that engage with graphics in the real world.

Genres: Design

202 pages, Paperback

Published May 16, 2023

Reviews

[Isa]

Great read for references for research and phrasing

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious, frustrating book. On the one hand, I welcome its central thesis that asks designers to think of their work outside its abstract, idealized visioning and instead within the actual worlds it lives in. Yet the execution is so bogged down by hazy thinking and academic language—“Graphic event”? Really? That’s the most lucid term we could come up with?—that I scream, “Oh, the irony!” and want to throw the book at the wall.

The authors keep talking about designers opening up the discourse to the layman and the person on the street, yet everyone who is cited/interviewed/guest-writes here is exactly the opposite of that—either ivory tower academics or rarefied practitioners making design about design. And going after Paula Scher, one of the more lucid (if often self-serving) commentators on design, just feels like sour grapes. Finally, can I get through one graphic design theory book without the names Saussure and Barthes coming up? We need a new lexicon and new source material already…