Wednesday 14 January 2009

No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism

Rick Poynor




Poynor, R. (2003) No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism, Laurence King Publishing Ltd.

"Graphic design as a profession has long had an aversion to theory" p10

“No More Rules’ central argument is that one of the most significant developments in graphic design, during the last two decades, has been designers’ overt challenges to the conventions or rules that were once widely regarded as constituting good practice.”
(Poynor, p12)

“The last 20 years “has seen an explosion of creative activity in visual communication, as designers re-examined existing rules and forged new approaches. Graphic design is a much more open, diverse, inclusive and, perhaps too, inventive field as a result of these challenges. (…) As a professional activity, graphic design faces an uncertain future now that the new technology has opened up graphic production and expression to many more people.”
(Poynor, p17)


I never read the entire book as it wasn't fully relevant to my initial area of enquiry regarding graphical user interface design. This enquiry is written up as a paper that can be downloaded here as a pdf. The three quotes above were useful to me to assess the factors that graphic design, as a discipline, is having to address in order to develop and grow.

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