The graphic design reader

[In this book, the author] delivers as provocative look at the craft of design in this highly personal collection of nearly fifty essays. Singling out familiar cultural icons, groundbreaking publications, influential designers, and underground movements, [he] combines candid introspection with a sweeping knowledge of the field. With approaches ranging from critical, as in an evaluation of the self-indulgent "Me Too" design of the 1980s, to laudatory ... this anthology flirts with irony, nostalgia, and humor as it sheds light on the designer's role in influencing pop culture.-Dust jacket

Originally published: New York : Allworth Press, ©2002.

Critiques: Me too generation; History lite; Underground mainstream; This is not a library; You've got spam ; Cheapskate design; Hate thy enemy; G.I. Fritz -- Commercial arts: Ice cream and hot issues; Hard cover sex; Presidential caricature, ritual mutilation; More than wham! bang! boom!, the art and design of comics lettering; Shock of the vile; Look ; For 100,000 good men; A man's home is his magazine; Regressive progressive; Trust fund fashion mag flaunts design; Pokmon, a dialogue; Sho-card writin; Calendar girls of colonial Hong Kong; That pesky television test pattern;--Julian Allen's pictorial legacy; People: Boris Artzybasheff's clear complexity; Interior lustig; Randism; Sutnar & Londerg-Holm, the Gilbert and Sullivan of design; Art [Paul] of Playboy; Masters of a lesser art, David Levine and Edward Sorel; Barbara Kruger, graphic designer?; Gary Panter, on the margins looking out; Number seventeen, quick-cut culture; Sara Fanelli's wild things -- Introspectives: Swastika guilt; Hospital blues; Times they are a-movin'; School tie -- Memoirs: Growing up underground; I was a seventeen-year-old pornographer; Sopranos and me; My mentor.