A History of Graphic Design

by Philip B. Meggs

Critical acclaim for previous editions of A History of Graphic Design

"I expect it to become a foundation and keystone of serious study . . . it is a fortress work." -Communication Arts

"[It] traces the role of the designer as a messenger of culture." -STA Journal

"Now . . . a hefty, yet concise, documentation of the entire field exists." -Print

"It is a noble and formidable undertaking." -he Artist's Magazine

"An excellent and invaluable work." -Library Journal

"This is a reference work that reads like a novel. It's comprehensive, authoritative, graphic, and exciting." -U& The Journal of Typographics

"[This book] establishes graphic design as a profession. Bravo!" -Design Issues

"A significant attempt at a comprehensive history of graphic design . . . it will be an eye-opener not only for general readers, but for designers who have been unaware of their legacy." -The New York Times

"Mr. Meggs enthusiastically conveys these excitements to us, from the invention of photography and 'popular graphics of the Victorian era' through the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, the Secession, the isms . . . to the Modern Movement. . . . More importantly, he shows us the joins as well as the parts."-rinting World

After a decade of research by the author, the first edition of A History of Graphic Design was heralded as a publishing landmark by the Association of American Publishers, who awarded it a coveted award for publishing excellence. Now, after fifteen years of development in graphic design, this expanded and updated Third Edition includes hundreds of full-color images and new material in many areas, including alphabets, Japanese and Dutch graphics, and the computer revolution which has impacted all aspects of contemporary design and communications. With its approximately 1,200 illustrations, lucid text, and interpretive captions, the book reveals a saga of creative innovators, breakthrough technologies, and important design innovations.

Graphic design is a vital component of each culture and period in human history, and in this account, an extraordinary panorama of people and events unfolds,
* The Invention of Writing and Alphabets
* Medieval Manuscript Books
* The Origins of Printing and Typography
* Renaissance Graphic Design
* The Arts and Crafts Movement
* Victorian and Art Nouveau Graphics
* Modern Art and Its Impact on Design
* Visual Identity and Conceptual Images
* Postmodern Design
* The Computer Graphics Revolution

A History of Graphic Design is recognized as a seminal work; this Third Edition surpasses in detail and breadth the content, design, and color reproduction of previous editions. It is required reading for professionals, students, and everyone who works with or loves the world of graphic design. This comprehensive reference tool is an invaluable visual survey that you will turn to again and again.

Genres: Design, Art, Nonfiction, History, Art Design, Reference, Textbooks

528 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Philip Baxter Meggs was an American graphic designer, professor, historian and author of books on graphic design. His book History of Graphic Design is a definitive, standard read for the study of graphic design.
He has been called the most important historian of design since Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983). In contrast to Pevsner, he published a history of graphic design that went beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the first educators to create an overview of the history of graphic design that did not depend exclusively on the traditional structure of the history of the art, Meggs believed that graphic design would need to acquire an adequate understanding of the past and its relation with art.

Reviews

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took a summer class on the History of Graphic Design and had to read this book...not cover-cover, but pretty close. It's the only class I've actually had the time to complete all of the assigned readings for, and I'm really glad I did. This book is the only one of its kind that I've found. I learned so much from it. It's always been very confusing to try to find where our history is (as graphic designers)...Meggs was the first to really pool all the information in one place.

The only qualms I had with this book was that for being a book ON graphic design, they really didn't take great care in designing it too well. The book is long and slightly dull as you'd expect any textbook to get after a while, but the sans-serif made it slightly even more painful, and the layout was very disorganized (figure references don't show up until pages after they're already been discussed, you can read a full spread of straight text -which is agonizing- and then skim through a full spread of pictures, etc). The book is set up to give you a general overview of each movement, so it can be a little frustrating when your favorite designer gets a paragraph of recognition and Herbert Bayer gets ten pages, but in all honesty you can't expect a subjective topic like design to be perfectly aligned with what you view as more important.

All in all, I think its essential for any designer. Just like with painting, it's kinda hard to find your niche when you haven't had a chance to study the renaissance. It's definitely enriched my design background and vocabulary. You have to know your rules before you can break them, but you also have to know your history so you can see why people made the rules in the first place.

[Kass Johns · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Carrie Hannigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[4D · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Michael Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

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?

[Savannah 🩷 Holzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting and I learned a lot. Really bugged me that the images/diagrams were on a separate page sometimes 😂

[Dawn Kravagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn’t be more comprehensive. I really wanted to give it 4.5 stars as it broke down after chapter 22 and became a mere listing of dozens and dozens of different artists, instead of creating cohesive overviews of the postmodern design era of trends. I also wish that Part V was broken down into two segments: chapters 18-21, and then chapters 22-24 as Part VI. Needs a new edition, also.

However, the author takes an amazingly complex and long history (5000 BCE to 2016) of material and condenses it down to different movements and important milestones.

A couple thousand illustrations. This is quite an accomplishment.

[Isabela Cristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

*Foi um livro interessante para conhecer a história de tudo mas queria que fosse mais focado no design gráfico em si, e não só nos movimentos artísticos e políticos que influenciaram o design.
*Senti falta de designers não brancos, nem que fosse só em citação (tiveram alguns, mas não o bastante).

É o tipo de livro que é bom para procurar referências mas não vejo muita necessidade de jamais ler ele inteiro de novo.

[Adam B · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Zander · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Eric Aguirre · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Erythrocytes · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Yoshikage Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book in year 2004 but did not finish reading it until now.
Overall, it is an excellent overview of the main developments in graphic design, including styles, technologies, and people.
In long run I will probably remember more of the many beautiful image examples than the detailed text descriptions.

The book focuses mainly on static layouts and touches upon animations and interactive interfaces in the end, which, together with recent generative technologies, will probably be worth another book in the future.

[Mmd Amin]

I didn't read this edition of the book, but rather the sixth edition. And I must say this book is written with an interesting precision and provides really good information, especially about the history of typography. The initial sections of the book mainly focus on the topic of type and typography, but from the middle of the book, the discussion about posters and contemporary graphic design begins sooner than you might expect. The reason is that graphic design is a relatively new field, and most of its innovations and related movements are recent (after the Industrial Revolution).

[Colleen Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a textbook, but I honestly really enjoyed it. I'd always viewed art history as disconnected from real life, and superfluous. But...art changes and shapes life all around it, and graphic design especially. Learning about the role of design in war-time propaganda, civil rights movements, and other various cultural movements was truly fascinating. Looking forward to diving into the history of Animation this quarter!

[A Chardin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a good reference for looking up movements and history. I find the images are more useful than the text, which is wordy, and the important information is buried in the historical facts. I kind of hated it in my graphic design history class, because I had to read huge parts of chapters, but I like it better now. It's like a coffee table book, I leave it around to browse and for inspiration for design projects.

[Carl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciated this book. I’ve worked as a copywriter and creative director in advertising for over 30 years, but never had any formal training. I’ve had to soak up knowledge as I went along — most of which came through trade magazines, like Communication Arts and Graphis. This resource has been so helpful in contextualizing all the tools of our trade, from printing to typography to photography to digital media. Having this background adds so much richness to what I do.

[Neale Sourna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abandoned reading this textbook, may come back later.

[Ania Gaska · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad.

[Nathan H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read Chapters 7-24 for GMD 120 at College of the Canyons, very dry

[Jennifer Kent]

It was very interesting. But it was a school text so hard to read at some points. I kept it though

[Jacob]

Jan 2020 - enjoyed chapter on Arts & Crafts movement. Made a small vector library ripping off William Pickering's Elements of Euclid shapes and colors.

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very rich and enlightening read for those who care about the history and movements of the art

[Hannah Leimkuhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great textbook for learning the art history of design. Learned a lot from it

[raine farrar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Textbook for school

[Jaz]

Good textbook to use!

[Riley Allman · Rating 3 out of 5]

it’s just SO dry.