Foreword / Steven Heller -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Josef Mu˜ller-Brockmann: "schutzt das Kind!" and the mythology of Swiss design -- Koloman Moser's Thirteenth Secession Exhibition poster (1902): anatomy of a work of Viennese graphic design -- Cassandre and Dubonnet: art posters and publicite in interwar Paris -- Frank Zachary at Holiday: travel, leisure, and art direction in Post-World War II America -- Food, race, and the "New Advertising": the Levy's Jewish Rye Bread campaign 1963-1969 -- Graphic design and politics: Thomas Nast and the "TAMMANY TIGER LOOSE" -- The politics of learning: Dr. John Fell and the Fell Types at Oxford University in the later seventeenth century.
Summary:
Reading Graphic Design History uses a series of key texts from the history of print culture to address issues of class, race, and gender, encouraging the reader to look at print advertising, illustration, posters, magazine art direction, and typography critically as well as aesthetically, using contemporary literary and other visual evidence from the fine arts, architecture, fashion, and popular prints. David Raizman's innovative approach intentionally challenges the canon of graphic design history, or traditional understandings of graphic design that privilege key schools or movements. He re-examines "icons" of graphic design in light of their local contexts, avoiding generalization to explore underlying attitudes about women's roles in society, the relationship between politics and print, race, and ethnicity. He therefore encourages new ways of reading graphic design that take into account the specific and often local context for graphic design activity rather than generalizations that discourage the understanding of difference and the means by which graphic design communicates cultural values.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.