Design / Writing / Research: Writing on Graphic Design
  Published by Phaidon, Copyright 1996 by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller
  Review By Joanna Rieke
   
  Forget Jeff Koons, David Byrne, or Dan Deacon. Whenever I mention I went to MICA, people always ask, "doesn't Ellen Lupton teach there?" I'm not surprised this is their fist question since she is such an influential part of the MFA Design Program, along with an engaging advocate for the autodidact, converting the public into producers with her D.I.Y. Books. On top of that, she designs, writes, and well, researches exhibitions as a curator for the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
   
  I'm glad that this month we picked her sturdy series of articles bolted together in Design Writing Research. Judging from the title, (also the name of her former blog and studio with Abbott Miller from 1985) writing is quite literally central to her work. Rick Poynor wrote in the introduction that, "designers who write about design are increasingly anxious to design what they write." Lupton continues in this lineage of writer-designers from Lubalin, Lustig, and Sadek who fuse form and content, text and image.
   
 

Smart in Scala, her investigation into our reading of signs from post-structuralism, punctuation, and pictographs eloquently unifies what is discussed with the way it is written. Warhol's soup cans mirror a repetitive layout of epigrams just as a playful essay on Otto Neurath scatters logographs throughout. The book would please anyone passionate about etymology, semantics, and the history of symbols. While you don't need a PhD in Linguistics to be a great designer, it would be helpful to understand the history and theory behind our practice. A reading of the monumental History of Graphic Design by Phillip Meggs would certainly compliment the work in here. (1 of 3 next >)
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