The Graphic Design Bible

Theo Inglis

First annotation on Mar 9th, 2025. Last on Mar 10th, 2025.

8 quotes

Chapter 1

The Avant-garde 'We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.'Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, 1909 'The time of destruction is at an end. A new age is dawning: the age of construction.'De Stijl: Manifesto V, 1923
A common concern was that the limitations of the computer, as a tool, would dictate design aesthetics too much, and that, as Paul Rand put it, 'whatever "special effects" a computer makes possible' would seduce designers to ignore graphic design's foundational principles of communication. As a phrase often attributed to Marshall McLuhan holds, 'We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.'

Chapter 2

For graphic designers, semiotics explains how and why pieces of visual communication function, and suggest ways in which our work could be more successful at delivering messages. Often obscured by difficult philosophical jargon, semiotics generally seeks to explain phenomena that can seem fairly obvious once you understand the points being made. Designers, to succeed, should have an innate awareness of, and interest in, the creation of meaning and the different ways of achieving effective communication. Using all three types of sign – icon, index and symbol – is second nature in graphic design.
William Morris (1834–96), who famously said: 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.' Modernism would later combine these two seeming opposites, promoting the idea that utility was itself beautiful (in contrast to the classical view of aesthetics that beauty was entirely separate from meaning or function). Later, postmodernism would challenge this, embracing again the subjectivity of taste, and challenging traditional notions of beauty
A German word with no exact equivalent in English, gestalt means how something has been put together or arranged, and is associated with a movement in psychology that emerged in the early 20th century in Germany and Austria. Gestalt psychology was born out of a belief that it was essential to study things as a 'whole', rather than in their constituent parts, to mirror how human perception itself works.
Gestalt psychology highlights the importance of understanding how, in our minds, the receiving and processing of information are not separate, but one unified whole. Gestalt theorists identified many principles that are important for graphic designers to understand, for instance the 'figure– ground' relationship, which is used to understand how viewers perceive the difference between foreground and background in a two-dimensional image. Factors impacting this relationship include contrast, scale, position and use of space.
By the time of the Cold War, propaganda in the West had become more sophisticated and in general aimed to be less obvious, not even appearing to be propaganda. This has been termed 'soft power' – getting people to want the outcome you want through covert co-option, not blatant coercion.
In a 1970 essay, US philosopher Susan Sontag (1933–2004) explored the role of design within capitalism: 'What keeps posters multiplying in the urban areas of the capitalist world is their commercial utility in selling particular products and, beyond that, in perpetuating a social climate in which it is normative to buy.'15 This idea was built upon by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924–88), who wrote that designers' work 'brings commodities into circulation. It promotes them. Whether it is cultural and of public or social interest, or of private use and interest is a difference forever futile once culture has become part of the market and the public is privatised