Preorder from Bloomsbury Academic Press (Jan 2022) Type Specimens: A Visual History of Typesetting and Printing (Bloomsbury) explores founders’ and printers’ specimens as a way of understanding the visual format and professional practice of the specimen, as well as the ways that prior global typographic exchange shapes today’s design landscape. With 250+ images of specimens from 24 countries and in 15 scripts, the book takes design’s global past seriously without minimizing the discipline’s history of colonization and cultural imperialism. As a design researcher and educator, I wrote a book I ..read more

Berthold Hebrew type specimen book, 1924 (source) As the guest editor for a special issue of the visual communication design journal Visible Language, I centered the histories of designers, artifacts, practices, and global design communities that have been relegated to the periphery of disciplinary dialogues in western Europe and North America for far too long. During this process, I discovered that I love editing for one of the same reasons I love teaching: it’s a chance to learn something entirely new about the practice and history of design. Throughout the long editorial process, I remained ..read more

Japan Imperial Government Railways guidebook, 1915 “How to See Japan” is forthcoming in the Journal of Design History. Here’s its official abstract: The interwar English-language guidebooks published by the Japan Tourist Bureau utilized a diverse set of graphic design strategies on their front covers to communicate the cultural identity of Japan to anglophone tourists. Many of the covers borrowed the aesthetic conventions of European Modernism, rendering the Japanese landscape and its inhabitants familiar to the western tourist gaze. Conversely, others evoked the visual conventions of traditio ..read more

A Fashionable Melange of English Words, Kamekichi Tsunajima, 1887 (source). At the AIGA Design Educators Community conference this June, I’m facilitating a workshop on using digital humanities resources to teach global design history. It can be tricky to find English-language, open-access sources that offer both high-quality reproductions and useful context for images that aren’t in your typical survey textbook. Though it’s not usually what I post about here, I’d like to share a few of the resources I use in both the studio and the design history classroom. Many sources mentioned here have dec ..read more