Between the 1880s and the 1980s, typography mutated from an entirely manual, craft-based practice to a comprehensively mechanized, then a fully digitized one. With the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh computer in 1984, the graphic design profession found itself in the midst of a deep transformation of its tools, techniques, and division of labor. Throughout the 1990s, graphic designers experimented with the boundaries of legibility, questioning the accepted standards of professional practice. Partially in response to the alarmed criticisms of a modernist establishment, boundary-pushing graphic designers increasingly turned to radical theory in an attempt to grasp — and ultimately to transform — their social role. This “postmodern” or “deconstructionist” turn was both ambitious in its goals and ambivalent in its results: as early as the mid-1990s, typographical experiments informed by cultural and linguistic theory had begun to surface in mainstream advertising campaigns. This dissertation begins with an account of the central role played by modernism in the development of the design disciplines. Stepping beyond that canonical narrative, it then re-situates graphic design in a history of rationalization, automation, and deskilling. As this study concludes, the period’s frantic visual styles and frequently overstretched theoretical expositions can be reinterpreted as attempts to grasp deep and ongoing transformations in the experience of capitalist work.

Creator

• Brown, Jefferson Dakota

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-aegm-1r78

Subject

• Design
• Art history
• American studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15992
• etdadmin_upload_894059

Keyword

• graphic design
• postmodernism
• labor
• theory
• typography
• capitalism

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright