Influences: a lexicon of contemporary graphic design

This book looks at who or what is influencing, provoking, inspiring and informing graphic designers today. It looks at the vast and seemingly endless spectrum of objects, memories, people, ideas, thoughts and references that form the backbone of any given creative project.

This volume of almost 3000 entries, which begins with a definition of the 1978 book ‘100 Posters of Tadanori Yokoo’ and concludes with the influential designer ‘Zwart, Piet’, set out to select the people, artefacts, performances, movements, concepts and theories that have been the catalysts for the development of contemporary graphic design.

With reference to their respective professional colleagues and students, the co-authors scoped the volume in terms of the entries and jointly researched each one. Each entry has two layers. The first was subjective and was researched and compiled by the co-authors. The second layer was subjective and is the contribution to the volume of the person who nominated for inclusion.

The volume also acknowledges that graphic designers select catalysts from a number of fields so that the entries include, to give examples the arcade game ‘Xevious’ (nominated by Quentaro Fujimoto, the photocopy machine (nominated by Tony Credland), the dance performance ‘In the Upper Room’ (nominated by Michael Bierut), ‘Benetton Advertisements; (nominated by Thierry Brunfaut) and Frank Zappa (nominated by Pierre Di Sciullo).

The volume was designed to be a selectively and eclectically illustrated volume organised alphabetically. Thus a 1925 classic experimental typography design by Piet Zwart, a Xerox poster by Tony Credland, a modern photograph of Pierre Di Sciulls’s Frank Zappa album collection and an Olivero Toscani photograph for a Benetton campaign, are all included as visual references.

Idea published an extract from Influences before the volume was published. A number of graphic and design journals noticed or reviewed Influences including Grafik and Form. A special issue of the publication Shift! was devoted to it.

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