Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context

Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context explains key ways of understanding and interpreting the graphic designs we see all around us, in advertising, branding, packaging and fashion. It situates these designs in their cultural and social contexts.
Drawing examples from a range of design genres, leading design historians Grace Lees-Maffei and Nicolas P. Maffei explain theories of semiotics, postmodernism and globalisation, and consider issues and debates within visual communication theory such as legibility, the relationship of word and image, gender and identity, and the impact of digital forms on design. Their discussion takes in well-known brands like Alessi, Nike, Unilever and Tate, and everyday designed things including slogan t-shirts, car advertising, ebooks, corporate logos, posters and music packaging.
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"In this critical yet accessible book, Grace Lees-Maffei and Nicolas P. Maffei shift the popular perception of graphic design from surface treatment to complex cultural practice." --D.J. Huppatz, Associate Professor of Architecture and Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
"Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context is a refreshing and insightful contribution to design history and a valuable resource for teachers, students, and scholars of visual communication. This engaging set of historical case studies expands the discipline to consider such topics as the colonization of public space in both print and digital media; the relationship between legibility and ambiguity in modern and postmodern design; gender, race, and desire in fashion photography and advertising; wide-ranging information graphics from maps and sign systems to the "quantified self"; slogan t-shirts; music packaging; corporate brand identity; concerns for environmental sustainability; visual techniques of persuasion in guide books and advice literature; and the evolving medium of the book. It offers a clearly written, accessible, and compelling argument that semiotics continues to provide a dynamic, flexible model for making sense of a world increasingly saturated by visual signs today.
It is an excellent critical guide, the best written thus far, to the study of signs, which emerged in structural linguistics and anthropology of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the early twentieth century, and which evolved in the work of Charles Peirce and Roland Barthes. Students as well as general readers will appreciate this clear and concise overview of a topic that can easily confound even the sharpest thinkers." --Rebecca Houze, Professor of Art and Design History at Northern Illinois University, USA