This summer, I'm trying my level best to learn the history of graphic design from the ground up. In the long term, this project is to shore up my understanding of the interactions between word and image in the 20th century. In the short term, I can grasp what was happening to graphic design in the early twentieth century and compare it to comics history.
I picked up this volume, by Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, because I hoped it would explain graphic design in a language I already understand, High Theory. So far it's still a challenge. The nature of textbooks requires their authors to move quickly past concepts that actually do require a little more depth.
Chapter one lays out graphic design in prehistory. In doing so, the chapter also outlines the principles of graphic design in general, but in piecemeal fashion. Statements such as, "only humans have the capacity to represent absent and abstract phenomena in symbolic form" throw me for a loop. I need to sit down and think them through (luckily, I have the capacity to represent abstract phenomena in symbolic form, so thinking it through is theoretically possible). So I am moving very slowly.
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