3 Review(s)

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.