Before diving into Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, I faced a dilemma. Should I jump right in or should I wait until the fall since the book is required for Graphic Design History class? Once I began the first chapter, however, I couldn’t stop.

With almost 600 pages, the book began with the invention of writing and ended at the digital revolution. The first two parts are fascinating, especially chapters on the alphabets and the progression of print and typography. Part three and four are comprehensive in documenting the graphic design moments and prominent designers. While the layout is filled with rich visual examples to complement the texts, the body copy, which set in Sabon Next, is a bit loose.

The historical details definitely needed to be revisited again, but this is the first textbook that I have read from cover to cover.

Abandoned reading this textbook, may come back later.

This is my bible. I use this book as a constant reference for my everyday work.

i want to start with something interesting, so i choose this book

A classic and a must-read.

686.22 M497h 2016

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.

Incredibly thorough on Western history, but as a teacher of primarily Black and brown students I feel it's light on indigenous and modern BIPOC designers and influences. Consider expanding this in the next edition.

Not bad.

TODO full review:
! Read the fifth edition (2012), which includes updates in Part V until 2010.
+++ Overall, an outstanding overview of graphic design, from prehistory to the digital age. I learned much. Mandatory reading for all interested in design.
+++ Part I, Prologue. Subjects cover: the invention of writing and a concise but deep incursion into the known history of alphabets, up to the highly designed Korean Hangul; the contribution to graphic design Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian sources; the contribution to graphic design of illuminators, including the Arabic thread.
+++ Part II, the Renaissance: presents the birth of European typography and image-text prints. Gutenberg, Dürer, Luther are the main figures, with technology for printing enabling so much of the European arts and crafts that characterized the Renaissance.
+++ Part III, the Industrial Revolution, through Arts and Crafts, to Art Nouveau: a good, selective but deep, coverage of creativity between 1760s and 1910s.
++ Part IV, the Modernist Era: the huge factory (Ford) and massive urbanization leads to a new life for many, and art follows (or leads). Cubism (Picasso), Constructivism (Lissitzky), De Stijl (Mondriaan), and Bauhaus (Gropius et al.) lead the modern movement. (Unfortunately, Communism and Nazism appropriate the methods of some of these schools as useful propaganda tools).
+/--- Part V, the Information Age: covers 1940s/1950s through 2010s, but already shows its age. The rise of corporate identity is well covered, but new advances in personal identity, cross-medium branding, manga fetishism, and cross-pollination with gaming do not appear here. Perhaps a new Part VI, FTW?

An interesting and informative read, as well as inspiring. However, the last couple of chapters start ok but rapidly descend into what seems like a who's who, which becomes a little tedious.

In terms of layout too I found myself flipping backwards and forwards, marrying up images with the text references, which became slightly annoying. Bad design, in a design book?

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.