Paperzine - News

Design history books abound, and seminal texts such as Richard Hollis’s Graphic Design: A Concise History (1994) are required reading on design courses around the world. But too many of these books act as straightforward encycleopedias or dictionaries of design, tracking through its development in isolation from the social context in which it should be examined to have any real meaning.
Graphic Design: A History goes some way to addressing this problem. Structured as a chronology from the nineteenth century to the present, its author Stephen Eskilson explores design and typography’s role in critical creative milieus, bringing in the prevailing social, political and economic conditions of different geographical locations to chronicle design and art movements such as art nouveau and  modernism to constructivism and Bauhaus, through such upheavals as the industrial revolution and the Russian revolution to the seismic shifts in technology that have occured in the past two decades.
However, despite revisions including almost 100 new images and updating to incorporate striking new conceptual thinking in contemporary design directions in the final chapter, Eskilson’s new edition still doesn’t feel as strong as its most obvious competitor, Megg’s History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis, published in its fifth edition in December 2011. Physically, this easily outweighs Eskilson’s offering, with over 130 more pages and almost three times as many illustrations, and what those extra pages and illustrations enable is a depth and richness that makes if feel more authorative, more comprehensive and better contextualised. And it is all of these things thanks to an exhaustive and fascinating chronology of design that Meggs began back in 1998 with his first edition, and which has been ably updated by Alston Purvis, professor of Graphic Design at the Boston University College of Fine Arts. In a world filled with design histories, Meggs’ remains the definitive, real, deal.