Rick Poynor Lecture

"I'll be your mirror: A critical look at the design monographs"

Rick Poynor

On Tuesday 17Th March I went up to Sheffield Hallam University and attended a talk held by Rick Poynor. Rick is a British writer, he writes about graphic design, typography and visual culture.  Some of the things Rick has achieved/done in his career is; founded Eye Magazine, co-founded Design Observer, taught at such places as the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and finally, stared in the film Helvetica.Rick Poynor is someone who has a great interest in design monographs, one thing he did mention about design monographs is that they are aimed at the 'star' people within design industry. One tip Rick advised us upon was that design monographs are no good to critically analyse. This is down to how there is no right nor wrong within the text and each piece is very opinion based.

Rick then moved onto talk about the monograph as a self-interpretation, this is where he started showing us different sets of books and

 there spreads. One that he did show us was The End of Print, David Carson, this was the most successful selling design monograph book to date, and what helped was that the book was set out in Carson style work, this resulted in type overlapping imagery and the type not being readable. But looking at it from a monograph perspective, Rick found it very hard to separate his work pieces from one another.

Another book that Paynor showed us was that by Stefan Sagmeister. In this book Stefan started the monograph by putting 'not another design monograph' on the front spread. This implies that he doesn't really take his monographs very serious. Another thing about Sagmeister which is interesting, is how he annotates his own work, this is a rare thing because you don't see many designers doing that.

Rick ended off by talking about the future of the monograph. This isn't an obvious conclusion due to the fact of the introduction of the web based information. Due to the internet being so easily accessed from such broad places and areas this results in that the monograph sales are going down hill due to the fact that the internet is cheaper and quicker.