BY STEPHEN HELLER and MIRKO ILIC
Thames & Hudson 2008
ISBN 978-0-500-28729-3
£18.95
Review by Esther Dudley, Design Research, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth
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The acknowledgements section indicates why a book so rich with images as this is a rarity in the graphic design library. Every so often a major graphic exhibition gives us a comprehensive catalogue, such as the excellent Communicate at the Barbican, in 2005, the catalogue of which has become a much-recommended book for my undergraduate graphic designers. This book attempts something even larger and is, in effect, a catalogue of the history and context of graphic design over more than a century, without the filtering process of an exhibition.As the authors state, “there is no single clearing house for the major artefacts of graphic design”, so this work comes, by research and request, from hundreds of sources.
Despite the complexity of the research, the book follows a simple format: every left page is an example of a graphic idea, with the facing page demonstrating that idea in earlier and later designs: the visual icons are established, as are their antecedents and more recent interpretations.
“Icon” is too often used to mean hero in popular parlance and writing. Here it stands for iconographies and comes up with 108, They all belong, whether predictable or not, but their titles are the hook: flat men, primal screams, radiation fallout, chicken scratching. I just have to turn the pages.
Text is restricted to a four page introduction and captions at the top of each section, condensing the concept of each double page spread into a simple and graspable idea. It hardly needs stating that Heller and Ilic have both contributed a great deal of writing, of high quality, to graphic design and it shows in economical yet illuminating writing here.
“ The history of graphic design is the legacy of attempts to expand the universe of visual communication.”
The view they express is that by examining the roots of visual language and routes taken using that language, we arrive at an understanding of precedent that does nothing to diminish ingenuity when visual forms are revisited.
“ Individuals deposit ideas into a bank, yet every designer can make withdrawals.”
“New ideas percolate all the time. The design annuals, not to mention the real world, are filled with posters, advertisements, CD packages, magazine covers, even websites that genuinely startle and surprise. Nonetheless unique solutions are invariably derived from tested experience…one can be a clever designer and still never once create something from the whole cloth. But the clever designer knows how to marshal part or all of the extant design language to produce an unanticipated result.”
They liken their research to archaeology: unearthing the common recurring themes for this idiosyncratic collection, but arranging them within their visual types rather than within a standard chronology.
However arbitrary this selection is, Icons of Graphic Design ( everything old is new again ) will become indispensable, I am sure, to graphic design students. It stands alongside the excellent historical overviews of graphic design by Philip Meggs and Richard Holliis , and brings reassurance that originality does not spring from nowhere: every idea has its root and route. This book shows the work of hundreds of designers to illustrate the conceptual journey of graphic design. It is rich and beautiful.
