Aggie Toppins on Design History

My book is called “Thinking Through Graphic Design History,” and it surveys the emerging terrain where historical research and graphic design practice meet. It’s part theoretical exploration, part practical application with real-world case studies and creative prompts included so that readers can try some practical exercises that relate to the theories in discussion.

The idea to write this book came to me years ago when I was teaching. We live in an intertextual society and so much media, like internet memes, make reference to other forms of cultural production. I noticed that my students were often referencing the past, and sort of grasping at historical forms and styles, but they didn’t always have critical reasons for doing so. When I looked for readings to give them, I didn’t quite find what I was hoping for. I started asking questions about why the past appears the way it does, especially in graphic design history, and how the stories we tell ourselves about design in the past shape our current practices. Those questions eventually led to this book.

I spent time studying historical theory and the historiography of graphic design. I began to see a number of parallels between doing graphic design and doing history. Both fields are translational disciplines. Historians search for evidence about the past, and they translate facts into stories — facts about the past are kind of lifeless without the narratives that historians give them. Graphic designers do something similar by translating content into visual and textual form. Both fields live in the context of everyday and both are engaged in shaping belief.

When you encounter an excellent work of historical scholarship or a well-designed piece of visual communication, it feels self-evident, perhaps even natural. In reality, these things are always constructed. Part of my goal with the book is to help designers approach historical works with more criticality and situate their design projects more critically as well, through the study of the past.

When I was in college learning about graphic design history, I learned about it primarily through the stories of significant designers — and those designers were mostly white men from Europe and the United States. I learned that these designers made things the right way, and I should aspire to be like them. That’s a reductive reflection on my education, but it illustrates an experience shared by quite a few people who practice and teach today. This “canon” of exemplary designers is pervasive in the profession, but there are other ways to look at design in the past — more inclusive, and less singular ways. Through those lenses, we may better understand design as part of complex and changing social worlds. We also may better understand it as labor.

The word “canon” is becoming a bit of a buzzword, I’m afraid. I’m challenging it by talking about what the canon in graphic design is, where it comes from, and why it’s problematic in some ways. This comes at a moment when graphic design history is taking a turn from connoisseurship-based, art historical framings toward framings that pay more attention to histories of politics, culture, and labor. A key chapter in the book is about the reasons why designers might be interested in broadening the canon, or expanding the examples we study to include more practices, more people. There are good reasons for doing that, and there also good reasons to be cautious about how we do that.

There’s also a chapter on problematizing the canon. For me, this means approaching familiar topics with new eyes while recognizing that the canon is an unresolved problem. For instance, some of the most canonical figures in design history are those who studied and taught at the Bauhaus. Although some designers may be tired of hearing about Bauhaus, it is significant for a reason and there’s more to talk about than the simple accounts conveyed in many survey textbooks. There is new scholarship since the centennial of the school’s opening that illuminates occult activity, queer culture, and politics across a broad spectrum of possibilities — these aspects of the Bauhaus story situate it more within the tumult of its time and place.

There’s also a chapter that questions the impulse to canonize in the first place. I’ve said that design is produced in changing social worlds. Designers are also produced, by their circumstances as much as their talent, and their part in historical change is only one aspect of design history. The idea that history can be reduced to a roster of canonical figures makes it seem like graphic designers are more autonomous than they really are, as though their cultural production were somehow detached from the forces that constrain them or give them opportunities. These kinds of lessons — about how design and designers are produced — are valuable to a student who’s trying to use their work to contend with their time and place.

When I first started asking questions about why graphic design history looks the way it does, publishers weren’t all that interested. This was almost a decade ago. The world has changed — consider how social justice movements, particularly Black Lives Matter, have called attention to the relationship between history and power. People seem to be paying attention, in a very public way, to the histories we inherited and the stories we continue to tell. Now that this reckoning, as some have called it, is happening, graphic designers are also revisiting history and the stories we tell about our practices. If there’s something that’s surprised me about the process of researching and writing this book, it’s how swiftly change in the world made it possible for me to find an audience and keep pushing on these questions.

As I’ve worked on this book, I’ve seen how graphic designers and historians are starting to come together and really talk to each other about our common interests.

The Sam Fox School is a place where a number of faculty — myself, D.B. Dowd, Heidi Kolk, Chris Dingwall — are doing work in this overlapping space between historical scholarship and creative practice. We also have amazing archives at WashU that support our teaching and research. For the symposium, I invited four people who were featured in the book — J. Dakota Brown, Caspar Lam, Daniela Rosner, and Lauren Williams — to visit campus and deliver presentations. They are all educators who practice design and publish scholarly writing. Between them, their work concerns visual culture, labor and capitalism, typography, human-computer interaction, socioeconomic systems and responsibility, and intersections with race and class. The symposium will also feature a series of lightning presentations by students in the MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program. Overall, we’ll get to showcase our collections, our student work, our faculty’s expertise, and have an amazing day of conversation. My hope is that the symposium platforms boundary-pushing research, sparks new ideas, and keeps the momentum going.

Part of teaching is about preparing students for professions. Even if the work they do is tightly controlled by client direction, communication designers need to know how to think. They should learn how to do research so they can create intelligent responses and situate their work in something larger than themselves.

I want my students not only to respond, but also to ask their own questions and learn sound methods for answering them. Undergraduate students have so much to learn before they can gain access to a career in design. They learn a lot of diverse skills in our program, but one thing that cuts across all our classes is that students have to come up with ideas and be able to articulate them. If you’re a professional designer, even when you are given criteria, there comes a moment when it’s just you and your blank “canvas” — and that’s when you need both creative instincts and research skills. I hope that the things I teach my students help them have confidence in that moment.

I was trained in graphic design and spent a decade in the industry, working in branding, environmental graphics, and publication design. That was applied work. Since I became an academic, what I do has become more research oriented. I make self-authored creative work, which is informed by research, and I write about the history and discourse of graphic design.

These days, the focus of what I make is mostly grounded in collage. I use materials that pass through my life to make images and publications — and I’ve done some collage-based installation work recently. I think about found graphics the way a historian might think about sources. Collage materials are like fragmentary evidence of my own experience — places I’ve been, people I met. When I make things with, essentially, extant graphics, I’m drawing on a personal archive but also a host of shared meanings embedded in cultural materials. I revisit and reuse those sources over and over again.

Hopefully, if they’re coming out of our program, they are prepared for many different kinds of scenarios. WashU is a research school with a liberal arts orientation, and we try to introduce our students to many different ways of practicing. My hope is that they’re not prepared for a singular career trajectory, but that they’re actually equipped with skills that allow them to be flexible and resilient to a changing labor market. What labor looks like now is nothing like it looked like when I was in college, and it will change radically in the years to come.

If I can give them advice about the uncertainties they feel, I would say that their feelings are valid. It’s scary to go out into the world, especially as it’s rapidly changing. But they can be confident in themselves, because they have a great education, they’re smart, and as long as they can take the things that they’ve learned and apply them to many different kinds of situations — which will change over time — they’ll find their place.