Jarrett Fuller

Following up on my post from last week, I’m still thinking about the form of design books, especially graphic design books. On the one hand, I crave books on and about graphic design that experiment with the forms they take, blending writing and work, text and image ala Michael Rock’s Multiple Signatures or what Kevin Lo is starting to do in Design Against Design. I’ve written before about McLuhan and the experimental paperback as another model for blending text and image. On the other side, I’m also craving what I’ve started to refer to as “literary design criticism”.

I’d sketch out the boundaries of literary design criticism through a few lenses:

1. It’s writing that scintillates on the sentence level. When I feel the need to invigorate my prose, I’m often not turning to design writing the way I do with the writing, say, of a John Jeremiah Sullivan or a Zadie Smith.
2. It embraces the essay in all its definitions and permutations. It meanders and turns, the position shifts. Here, I’m thinking of the great essay writers like Joan Didion or James Baldwin who move between the personal and the political. When I read essays like this, I’m surprised by digressions, the turns, the breaks.
3. It embraces narrative and storytelling. Some of my favorite fiction reads more like criticism, using narrative as a container to wrestle with ideas, like Vinson Cunningham’s novel Great Expectations or Jenny Ofill’s Department of Speculation. Alternatively, memoir and biography can be non-fiction that embraces storytelling like Robert Caro’s books, for example.
4. It’s writing that has a voice. The non-fiction writing that seems to stick with me is the writing with a strong voice, like the books by Brian Dillon or Olivia Laing whose voice appears to effortlessly move from subject to subject.
5. It’s writing that’s ambitious and experimental. It plays with genre, with structure, with tone. Think of Teju Cole’s more experimental writing or something like David Foster Wallace’s The Prose Poem or Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts.

Where is the writing like this in the worlds of graphic design (or design, more generally?). Most writing on graphic design, as writing, is…fine. Much of it does not, for better and for worse, rise to the level of beautiful, precise prose. Of course, there’s a small market for literary design criticism and venues for design writing are few and far between. The design magazines left aren’t looking for this type of writing (save, maybe places like The Serving Library or the Are.na blog?). That said, there are places where this type of writing can emerge.

The book that immediately comes to mind that fits this bill is Justin Beal’s Sandfuture, the 2021 hybrid memoir-biography of architect Minoru Yamasaki. Written without chapters, almost in a stream-of-consciousness prose, Beal alternates between his own experience as a working artist in New York and the life of Yamasaki. It’s experimental, especially for a book about architecture from an academic press like MIT Press, and it’s a book that’s stuck with me years after first reading it¹.

I’m thinking, too, of Prem Krishnamurthy’s On Letters, an epistolary book of essays written as a series of letters to artist On Kawara. In this one-way dialogue with the late artist, Prem ruminates on art, on math, on typography, on life and death, making for a more personal set of texts, I think, then Prem would have given us otherwise.

On Letters reminded me of Edmund de Waal’s Letter to Camondo, an another epistle to Moïse de Camondo, that explores memory, time, and family history. de Waal, a potter and writer, doesn’t write about design in the strict sense (and certainly not graphic design), but his books, including The Hare with Amber Eyes and The White Road, in addition to Letters to Camondo, serve as a model for the literary design criticism I’m sketching out here. The White Road, perhaps is the closest example as he writes about the history of white porcelain through his own experience and travels.

I think Jessica Helfand’s 2015 book Design: The Invention of Desire gets close to this. Jessica told me once she thinks that book is her most personal and I agree. Henry Cobb’s monograph Words and Works feels like a cross between memoir and design criticism that is perhaps another edition feels like another example of a monograph-of-ideas.

The best memoir of graphic design is Paul Sahre’s Two-Dimensional Man that flips the monograph upside, writing instead a highly personal reflection on his journey into design. I wrote about this book last year when I read it and still get excited by the possibilities it offers up. Tamara Shopsin, a designer and illustrator, also wrote a great memoir, Arbitrary Stupid Goal, and published her first novel a few years ago, embracing narrative and storytelling.

This is the type of design writing I want more of: writing about design that shows the best that writing can be; that plays with its forms and feels literary in the best sense. Who am I missing? What books or essays would you add to the list? Where is the best literary design criticism happening?