A History of Graphic Design by philip b. meggs

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

I absolutely love art history, but am working on my degree in graphic design. This book was a recommended text to supplement a class and it is absolutely the most engaging textbook I've ever read. I do not think there are many other history books specific to design, and there certainly are none that could compare with the depth, detail and quality of information presented in Megg's History of Graphic Design.

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TheBishList

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Excelente libro sobre la historia del diseño gráfico. Me quito muchos prejuicios que tenia sobre este, ya que siempre lo vi inferior a las bellas artes. Sin embargo, este libro conecta de una forma brillante el cubismo de Picasso, el constructivismo ruso, el dada, el suprematismo y muchos otros movimientos y artistas de vanguardia con el diseño gráfico.

Se podría decir que los inventores del diseño gráfico moderno fueron los rusos con el suprematismo y el constructivismo. Da risa saber que los primeros carteles publicitarios fueron inventados por un país en plena revolución comunista.

Es extraordinario porque desenmascara el hecho de que todo, absolutamente todo está conectado. Esas categorías que hacemos son falsas.

Extraordinario libro.

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Debesuotas

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Full disclosure, this was a textbook for my history of design class.
The writing was repetitive and formulaic, repeating slightly tweaked versions of the same information multiple times through each chapter. It’s far from concise with multiple paragraphs per chapter saying “this movement revolutionized graphic design because designers considered the relationship between visual and written information.” It likes to introduce a million different artists at once, leaving you with no real impression of any of them but the barest of facts about their personal lives.
The information is extremely focused on the western world and emphasizes written history as the only reliable source, completely dismissing oral histories.
Some antiquated language is also used, calling an artist an “invalid” and calling historical lower class people “illiterates.”
To top it all off the copy I purchased was misprinted with sone misaligned printing and the black pages showed every speck of oil from your fingers.

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lera

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

There is a special place in my heart for big, hard-back, fully colour-illustrated design histories. It brings me its own kind of joy, maybe because it is easier to forget how subjective any historical account must be when the narrative is organised around images. Megg's History provide just that, and on top of this it is also part of that very select club of textbooks which have achieved near hegemonic status. This means you can scoop it for a few quids online, and were you not to finish it will still make a great door-stopper.
It does what it says on the tin: a chronological history of visual communication, carefully skirting around the notion of 'art' and focusing on the genealogy of those fields we today associate with graphic design: typography, layouts, logos, posters, branding, etc. This it does by small paragraphs focusing often on individual designers, or sometimes movements, nearly all of which are illustrated with well chosen examples. My only reproach - but then again given the spoke of the volume, it would have been difficult to do otherwise - is that the size of the images does not allow the reader to really grasp the subtleties of many of those, especially when it comes to typography.
The book start with pre-history, moves through a general examination of the emergence of writing, and goes on to consider Greek, Roman and some East-Asiatic traditions. We move to the Middle-Ages, the invention of minuscules and the variations of textura, before reaching the Gutemberg moment, which gets a more thorough examination. XIXth and especially XXth century have pride of place, taking up about half of the book. We conclude with the post-war period, the submersion of the international style and the rise of post-modernism's various strands. The last part examines relatively contemporary evolution, in particular the emergence of those now ubiquitous digital tools.
The period between the Renaissance and the XIXth century is probably one with which many of us are less familiar, and although I was looking forward to it (emergence of humanist type, engraving, etc.) it turned out to be rather dull, a litany of names and events which the author failed at relating convincingly to elements of the designs he presented - something he did well in many other chapters. More characteristically, there was also a complete lack of ties to 'the broader picture' : graphic design is presented as a self-contained and autonomous field, influence at best by technology and the sister disciplines of art and architecture, but how and how much it might relate to politics, religion or science was completely left out. This, again, might be an unavoidable sacrifice for such a project, but it also contribute to make the book extremely repetitive at times, more akin to reading an encyclopaedia than a history.
To sum up: this is a useful and valuable resource for someone either dedicated to the subject, or to someone with already solid bases in visual and design history. For anyone else, it might prove of little interest, except as a reference book to be pulled occasionally out of the bookshelf, in which it is however bound to take much space.

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moju

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Okay, so I didn't read the entire book, but I read enough that I can write a good review of it. This book was my first introduction to Graphic Design. This book should be mandatory for anyone who designs documents, marketing materials, or other medias for the public. It establishes a progressive history of where design ideas came from and what influenced the designers, along with the consequences (good and bad) of their actions. The writing style is easy to follow. My only criticism is that the scope often seems narrow in a way that I feel I'm not seeing the big picture, but focusing on the details. Since a book that covers all the details and all of the big picture would be more than I can handle, I do ultimately prefer the style of this book (and know that I have to do more research on the topic to get a more rounded perspective).

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queenhinata

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

I used to teach a course based on this book. The book, while the information contained within is good... is a great example of how to NOT design a book. The layout of the book makes this difficult to read and understand. The entire book is typeset in a swiss sans serif for the body copy. This made it extremely difficult for not only my students to read and comprehend, but also for myself. EVERY halfway decent Graphic Designer knows that body copy is always to be set (for any lengthy publication of mostly text) in a SERIF typeface to ease the reader into a flow and continue to advance when reading. My students and myself found ourselves constantly tripping over the fact we were re-reading paragraph lines of text we had already read. The typesetting and layout made advancing through the copy very difficult. Too bad the layout was terrible while the content was of good quality.

Because this book is the only complete book on this subject I was forced to continue to use it. I used this bad layout/typesetting as a prime example of what NOT to do in design. It demonstrated to my students how a good message can be lost in bad design. (And vice versa) This topic generated many a good classroom discussions on the subject.

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zZJoennZz

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Comprehensive and an excellent source for images, but the text is so repetitive and hyperbolic that it's enough to drive you mad. I understand that a book on the history of graphic design is going to feature every innovation and innovator, but you can't just say line after line that this is the most stunning innovation ever!--not through over 600 pages. You'd think a book on graphic design would be better designed. Frustratingly, the references to the illustrations are frequently on a preceding or subsequent page.

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kazudachi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

There's not much to say about this book because it is exactly what the title says. There aren't many graphic design history books out there, and this one is the most comprehensive of all of them. It explains how and why design evolved, of course with lots of illustrations and pictures inside. It will teach you how different styles originated and what were their key characteristics. From earliest writing systems, to medieval manuscripts, to Art Nouveau, to Bauhaus, to current year digital design, this book covers all the key design movements and eras.
If you're a designer, this is a must-read. If not, you will learn a lot about design that surrounds us, gain a new appreciation of it, and if nothing else, expand your horizons.

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A History of Graphic Design

philip b. meggs

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