Design Dialogues

This wide-ranging compilation of interviews offers a colorful and candid introduction to the personalities, passions, and work of thirty- four respected designers, artists, authors, and media producers. With design as the common thread, each exchange opens an individual perspective on the visual culture at large, ranging in focus from the manipulative power of images to the place of theory in design practice to the myriad interactions between design and life. The stories are woven from experiences in media, theory, history, politics, and the blurry realm of interactivity, and are told by such notables as Ellen Lupton discussing her life as a design curator, Tibor Kalman confronting the relationship between practice and social responsibility, John Plunkett on his motivations for founding Wired magazine, and Ralph Ginzburg telling all about the controversial publication that ultimately sent him to prison. Both an oral history of graphic design and a living record of where we are today, these engaging and evocative dialogues provide anyone interested in design or popular culture with a means of understanding, as well as ideas for working in, the visual world around them.



Included are thirty-four black-and-white illustrations and interviews with: Massimo Vignelli, Paul Rand, Stephen Doyle, Jonathan Barnbrook, Jonathan Hoefler, Michael Ian Kaye, Dana Arnett, Chris Pullman, Jose Conde, Nicholas Callaway, George Lois, Philip Meggs, Rick Prelinger, Dan Solo, Rick Poynor, Ellen Lupton, Katherine McCoy, Johanna Drucker, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Michael Bierut, Sue Coe, Stuart Ewen, Ralph Ginzburg, Tibor Kalman, Richard Saul Wurman, Michael Ray Charles, Morris Wyszogrod, Jules Feiffer, Rodney Alan Greenblat, David Vogler, Edwin Schlossberg, Robert Greenberg, and John Plunkett.

Steven Heller is editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design and the chair of the MFA design department at the School of Visual Arts. He is the author or editor of more than seventy books on graphic design, and he is a contributor or contributing editor to nearly 25 magazines, including Print, U&lc, Eye Magazine, Communications Arts, ID magazine, Graphis, Design Issues, and Mother Jones. Since 1986 he has been senior art director of the New York Times, which he first joined as an art director in 1974. From 1967-1973, he served as art director for numerous publications, including Interview magazine, The New York Free Press, Rock Magazine, Screw magazine, Mobster Times, Evergreen Review, and the Irish Arts Center.



He was awarded three design grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1986,1988, and 1990. In 1996, he received a Special Educators Award from The Art Director's Club of New York. He has been the curator of ten design exhibitions, including "The Art of Satire" at the Pratt Graphics Center and "Art Against War" at the Parsons School of Design. Since 1986, he has directed "Modernism & Eclecticism: A History of American Graphic Design," an annual symposium at the School of Visual Arts. He lives in New York.