The scholarship is basic but accessibly useful. By any measure this provides design history scholars (and fans) an overview on steroids. Year-by-year spreads are supplemented with sidebars on hundreds of important projects, form-giver profiles and visual timelines of each decade. In this two volume Graphic Design set, author Jens Müller and editor Julius Weidmann exhaustively cover 140 years of graphic design, designers, typography styles and fashions from the late 19th century to the present. So to help make your decision, here is a brief description of each and their comparative merits. And while libraries should have them all, many readers do not have the money (or space) to buy (or store) them all. Of course, with so many volumes there is bound to be redundancy in both text and image. Today, in fact right now, there are at least four major new tomes, including two on The New Typography and Weimar design culture, a massive two volume set covering the full spectrum of commercial art and design, a third edition of a history seen through an art historical lens, and my own forthcoming Teaching Graphic Design History (Allworth Press) which will be out this summer. 40 years ago you couldn’t give away a book on graphic design history-well, actually you couldn’t even find one Phil Meggs‘ A History of Graphic Design was first published in 1983.
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