What It Means To Be a Designer Today
I’m excited to announce that my next book, What It Means To Be A Designer Today: Reflections, Questions, and Ideas from AIGA’s Eye on Design is now available for preorder!
Co-edited with my colleague Liz Stinson, this book, coming from Princeton Architectural Press in April, collects both previously published essays for Eye on Design, where I served as contributing editor for two and half years, as well as new, original essays conversations that survey the state of contemporary graphic design.
Here’s the official blurb:
Eye on Design is an editorial platform from AIGA that has, for the last decade, covered the ins and outs of the design industry. From documenting bold new work from global designers to chronicling the field’s most critical issues, their reported stories, op-eds, interviews, and conversations help designers make sense of the world and place their profession within a broader context. Weaving together original and previously published content from some of the most important writers in today’s design conversation, this book for designers encapsulates wide-reaching topics that strive to answer an essential question: What does it mean to be a designer today?
The book is organized into three sections: reflections, questions, and ideas. In Reflections, we look at the history of design and how it’s been discussed to make sense of how we got here. Questions offers provocations and debates about the current state of the design industry and practice. Finally, Ideas offers a set of goals to imagine alternative forms of graphic design practice, both for today and into the future.
The book features contributions from a range of thinkers, designers, and writers including Rick Poynor, Anne Quito, Briar Levit, Cliff Kuang, Khoi Vinh, and more. I also have two essays in the book: we’re reprinting my 2021 essay on minimalism as well as an expanded and revised version of my 2020 essay on design criticism.
While working on the book, I kept thinking about it as the lost, latest volume of the seminal 1990s anthologies, Looking Closer. Those books, which collected the important writing on design of that era, continue to be a touchstone in my thinking of what design writing can do. My hope is that this new collection of writing can do something similar: capture the design zeitgeist at the moment, help us make sense of it, all while showcasing great writing from the important emerging design writers of our time.
A big thanks must also go to previous EoD editors Meg Miller, Madeline Morley, and Zac Petit, whose fingerprints are all over this book, and to Perrin Drumm, the founder of EoD, who wrote the foreword. Thanks to AIGA and Princeton Architectural Press for their support and guidance — I’m excited for this to be out in the world.
The book will be available wherever books are sold on April 2, 2024 but pre-orders are opened now. You can get more information and buy the book here.