Opinion | Coming of age

by David Jury

The depiction of graphic design in books and journals has changed substantially even in the 20 years I have been writing about it. Despite its often initial, transient purpose, its reproduction in books is no longer exclusively concerned with its ‘newness’. It has become more about the place and the moment of its making, – ‘the historical witness that it bears’,¹ – its purpose and subsequent effects. Where a graphic object was once one of many, virtually identical units, age has provided each of those that have survived with a unique identity.

It used to be the case that in illustrated books concerned with the history of graphic design, great effort went into depicting printed matter as it appeared when new – as the designer intended it to look as it came off the press. This would often be achieved by isolating the graphic elements entirely from the original surface, with nothing but a rule to indicate the extent of the page. Sign of age was an indiscretion, irrelevant to the design and, therefore, removed. The result was the removal of any indication of the substrate...

¹Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, page 7, Penguin Books, 2008 (first published 1936).

Below Left: David Jury, About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography, designed by Vince Frost, 2002. Full-colour lithography and digital technology enables the presentation of graphic design to be a far more detailed and truthful representation. The book illustrated on the recto page is Thorowgood & Company’s Specimen of Printing Types, complete with a St. Bride Print Library rubber stamp at the foot of the page. Right: Typographica 15, 1957, designed by Herbert Spencer. The extent of the various pages (and gutters) is indicated by a black rule. These pages printed single-colour lithography.