My third book The New Design Documentary will be published in 2027 by Bloomsbury. In it I provide a critical analysis of films about design, most crucially several recent documentaries, representing design on film since 2007. Through these films designed objects, graphics, spaces, buildings, photographs, and other visual and material artifacts of design and their creators are pictured as recent and historic creative activity. All of these are defined by the boundaries of the camera’s lens as a space set aside to view design that feels expansive but is sometimes quite narrow. These documentary interpretations present designs that we see and touch every day as suddenly much more present, rather than as they are often assumed to be; a series of discrete artifacts, heroic monuments to their creators, stylistic vanity projects, crass materialistic objects, or media commodities. These documentaries merge with the delight we take in looking at the world through the language and form of film but also often reinforce notions of race and gender, especially male-whiteness.
Cover for my book published February 2021.
This is the first book in critical race studies for graphic design.
Ethics in Design and Communication Critical Perspectives
My essay Home: The Ethics of Addressing In-Equal Design appears in this new collection, published 02/20/2020.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ethics-in-design-and-communication-9781350077010/
The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America
My second book The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America was published in February 2021. It examines the role of design in establishing racial stereotypes first in print, and then over and upon objects, moving images, and into the digital sphere. It fills in part the significant gap in research on how the visual and material culture of graphic design has mediated much of the racialized rhetoric of U.S. American culture. The significance of my book to graphic design cannot be overstated. I can say unequivocally that although it is about U.S. graphic design’s historical reliance on racist imagery in establishing our consumer culture the need for it is immediate and vital.
Sustainable Graphic Design: Principles and Practice
My book Sustainable Graphic Design: Principles and Practice places graphic design at the center of sustainable design, imagining it as the primary force in holistically integrating ethical concerns with professional design practice worldwide. The book helps scholars and emerging designers visualize their roles in engaging with the field in response to ecological concerns, social justice, and present systems of design. The importance of the designer's role in this transformation is demonstrated by acritical and intimate engagement with the processes of making, materials, and the visual rhetoric that is emerging around sustainability.
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sustainable-graphic-design-9780857850638/