Graphic Design: The New Basics

THE BOOK

Graphic Design: The New Basics, published by Princeton

Architectural Press and Maryland Institute College of Art

(MICA) in Spring 2008, is a guide to basic design principles.

We created this book because we didn’t see anything like

it available for today’s students and young designers: a

concise, visually inspiring guide to two-dimensional design

written for today’s world.

As educators with decades of combined experience

in graduate and undergraduate teaching, we have witnessed

the design scene change and change again in response to

new technologies. When we were students ourselves in the

1980s, classic books such as Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design

Manual (published in 1965) had begun to lose their relevance

within the restless and shifting design world. Postmodernism

was on the rise, and abstract design exercises seemed out of

step with the current interest in appropriation and historicism.

During the 1990s, design educators became caught in

the pressure to teach (and learn) software, and many of us

struggled to balance the teaching of technical skills with

and critical thinking. Form sometimes got lost along the way,

as design methodologies moved away from universal visual

concepts toward a more anthropological understanding of de–

sign as a constantly changing flow of cultural sensibilities.

This book addresses the gap between software and vi–

sual thinking. By focusing on form, we have re-embraced the

Bauhaus tradition and the pioneering work of the great formal

design educators, from Armin Hofmann to some of our own

teachers, including Malcolm Grear.

The majority of student work featured here comes

from the course we teach together at MICA, the Graphic Design

MFA Studio. Also featured are excercises from a range of under–

graduate design courses. A sampling of those exercises are

assembled on this site. To complement the student work, the

book also presents key examples from contemporary profe–

ssional practice that demonstrate a variety of experimental,

visually richdesign approaches.

Graphic Design: The New Basics lays out the elements

of a visual language whose forms are employed by individuals,

institutions, and locales that are increasingly connected in

a global society. We hopethe book will inspire more thought

and creativity.

—Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips