Jarrett Fuller

Design Against Design, designer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo’s¹ new book from Set Margins is, at first glance, an essay collection in the vein that Set Margins excels at: provocative, casual, and highly illustrated². Upon closer inspection, however, this book is a bit more complicated, sitting somewhere between essay collection, memoir, and monograph.

The book opens with a highly personal — and grippingly confessional — essay from Lo that immediately suggests this is not your traditional design book³. In the following essays, Lo lays out his thesis, connecting design history, political theory, and reflections on his own practice and education. Divided between four sections: Critique, Practice, Materiality, and Autonomy, Lo moves between critical writing and personal reflection. There’s an essay on manifestos and design’s continual failure to live up to its social ideals. There’s another on Pantone and how subcultures use color in different ways. He reflects on his own projects, including a long-running collaboration with poet F.A. Nettlebeck and his work building a typographic union. Taken together, Lo sketches out how to build a graphic design practice rooted not in profit (or commercialism) but in protest, in justice, in community.

Lo’s voice is simple and clear but there’s a directness in his prose. His friendly approach makes it accessible and gives him the ability to move between subjects and from heavy to light topics. Illustrating each text and interspersed between them are projects from Lo’s studio LOKI. With LOKI, Lo’s work with rooted in social justice and community organizing. The studio’s work is typographically heavy, organized yet chaotic, employing copious glitches, layers, and breaks. The back and forth between text and image — ideas and practice — demonstrates that Lo and his collaborators are practicing what they preach: that these ideas are actualized through the studio work.

The book reminded me of the most — in form, not content — is Michael Rock’s 2014 Multiple Signatures. Rock described that book as a sequel or sibling of sorts to his firm 2x4’s monograph it is what it is — taken together, he called them a “non-monograph”. Where it is what it is is all images, Multiple Signatures was mostly text — essays by Rock (and sometimes others), interviews, and conversations — but it also was filled with work by 2x4. As you move through the book, moving from text to image and back again, a coherent argument emerges about Rock’s ideas around graphic design. Structurally, this is what Design Against Design is doing. (Rock’s is also divided into four sections: Authorship, Projects, Criticism, and Readership) These books, then, are less monographs of work than monographs of ideas.

I’ve written before about the role of monographs and I’ve come to see the best of the form as being not so much a printed portfolio of work but a container for a designer’s larger critical project: a way to narrativize a practice and draw connections from otherwise disparate projects. The best monographs aren’t just promotion of the designer but a new way to understand their work. The best design writing, on the side, should connect to the real world.

As I scan my shelves of design books, I’m struck by the almost rigid divide between books of text and books of images. I want to see more design books that blend the two, that tell a story in the work, both in theory and in practice. Kevin Yuen Kit Lo’s Design Against Design is exactly this type of book. I wish there more like it.