Transgression

by Rick Poynor

L'essai culte de Rick Poynor sur le postmodernisme dans le graphisme.Transgression est une véritable enquête au cœur du design postmoderne, du milieu des années 1970 à la fin du XXe siècle. Cette époque a transformé la discipline, en rejetant les canons du modernisme, qui dominaient la conception graphique depuis des décennies.Rick Poynor y raconte avec finesse et précision comment les designers graphiques et les typographes ont décidé de transgresser les règles établies et d'expérimenter de nouvelles approches visuelles.Chacun des thèmes clés du livre (la Nouvelle vague américaine, le punk, la révolution numérique de la typographie, le grunge, le statut de graphiste-auteur, la tendance du rétro et du vernaculaire…) est illustré par des travaux mythiques, qui ont révolutionné le monde de la communication visuelle.Lu, commenté et étudié par des générations d'étudiants en graphisme et de professionnels, Transgression revient dans une édition plus accessible mais toujours aussi riche en découvertes visuelles.

192 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2003

About the author

Rick Poynor is a British writer on design, graphic design, typography and visual culture. He began as a general visual arts journalist, working on Blueprint magazine in London. After founding Eye magazine, which he edited from 1990 to 1997, he focused increasingly on visual communication. He is writer-at-large and columnist of Eye, and a contributing editor and columnist of Print (magazine).

In 1999, Poynor was a co-ordinator of the First Things First 2000 manifesto initiated by Adbusters. In 2003, he co-founded Design Observer, a weblog for design writing and discussion, with William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Michael Bierut. He wrote for the site until 2005. He was a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London from 1994 to 1999 and returned to the RCA in 2006 as a research fellow. He has also taught at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. In 2004, Poynor curated the exhibition Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The exhibition subsequently travelled to four venues in China and to Zurich.

Poynor's writing encompasses both cultural criticism and design history and his books break down into three categories. He has written several monographs about significant British figures in the arts and design: Brian Eno (musician), Nigel Coates (architect) and Vaughan Oliver and Herbert Spencer (graphic designers). Other books document and analyse general movements in graphic design and typography. Among these are Typography Now, the first international survey of the digital typography of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and No More Rules, a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism. Poynor has also published three essay collections, Design Without Boundaries, Obey the Giant and Designing Pornotopia, which explore the cultural implications of visual communication, including advertising, photography, branding, graphic design and retail design.

Poynor was a prominent interviewee in the 2007 documentary film Helvetica.