Design history
Browse Design History
Every designer, movement, periodical and typeface in one searchable directory.
Design history
Browse Design History
Every designer, movement, periodical and typeface in one searchable directory.
Type
Era
Cluster
Nationality
94 entries
Directory results
A.M. Cassandre1901–1968DesignersThe French designer who turned the poster into a modern graphic object — and the typographer behind Bifur, Peignot and the YSL monogram.Adrian Frutiger1928–2015DesignersThe Swiss type designer who drew the alphabets we read every day.Aleksander Rodchenko1891–1956DesignersThe designer who turned the photograph into a political instrument.Alex Steinweiss1917–2011DesignersThe designer who turned the record sleeve into a work of art.Alexey Brodovitch1898–1971DesignersThe art director who taught a generation of American photographers to astonish him.Alvin Lustig1915–1955DesignersThe designer who put modern art on the bookshelf — and died at forty before anyone could catch up.Apple logo (Rob Janoff, 1977)1977WorksFour surface treatments. One silhouette. Forty-six years.April Greiman1948–DesignersThe designer who proved the Mac could be a serious design tool.Armin Hofmann1920–2020DesignersThe Swiss teacher who reduced graphic form to its minimum — and built the pedagogy that exported Basel worldwide.Art Nouveau (graphic design)1890–1910MovementsThe decorative-arts movement that turned the lithographic poster into a fine art.Arts & Crafts (graphic design)1860–1920MovementsThe Victorian movement that rebuilt the book — and laid the foundation for modern typography.Barbara Kruger1945–DesignersThe designer who made the magazine pull-quote a political weapon.Bradbury Thompson1911–1995DesignersThe Kansas printer who spent twenty-three years turning a paper-company house magazine into one of the most sustained typographic experiments in American design.Bruce Mau1959–DesignersThe Canadian designer whose book work with Rem Koolhaas and Zone Books made design an act of intellectual co-authorship — not decoration, but argument.Chermayeff & GeismarDesignersSixty years of abstract marks for the institutions that shaped postwar America.Chip Kidd1964–DesignersThe designer who made the book jacket the most-read piece of graphic design in America.Constructivism1915–1934MovementsThe avant-garde that turned typography into a political instrument.Corporate Identity1950–1975MovementsThe decades that turned a logo into a rulebook.Dada1916–1924MovementsThe anti-art movement that invented photomontage and broke typography open.Daniel Eatock1975–DesignersThe British designer who strips away aesthetics to let ideas do the work.David Carson1955–DesignersThe surfer-turned-art-director who tore up the Swiss rulebook and made type feel again.De Stijl1917–1931MovementsThe Dutch movement that reduced design to red, blue, yellow and the right angle.Debbie Millman1961–DesignersThe designer who put design criticism on the airwaves.Ed Fella1938–DesignersThe commercial artist who spent thirty years learning the rules before spending the next thirty breaking them.El Lissitzky1890–1941DesignersThe Russian artist-architect who fused Suprematism with typography and built the visual grammar of the avant-garde book.Ellen Lupton1963–DesignersThe designer who wrote the textbook an entire generation learned typography from.Emigre1984–2005PeriodicalsThe quarterly that made the early Mac's limitations look like design decisions.Emil Ruder1914–1970DesignersThe Basel typography teacher whose 1967 textbook still sets the terms for systematic typographic practice.Erik Nitsche1908–1998DesignersThe Swiss modernist who brought atomic-age abstraction to American corporate design — and did so without ever attending the Bauhaus.Eros, Fact & Avant Garde1962–1971MovementsThree magazines, one art director, and a typeface that outlasted all of them.Experimental JetsetOrganisationsThe Amsterdam studio that spent three decades insisting Modernism still has something to say.Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design1990PeriodicalsThe critical journal of record for graphic design — long-form criticism since 1990.First Things First1964ManifestosThe 400-word statement that asked designers to choose what they work on.George Lois1931–2022DesignersThe Greek kid from the Bronx who turned the magazine cover into a weapon, and the advertisement into an argument.György Kepes1906–2001DesignersThe Hungarian-born educator who reframed visual design as a science of perception.Helvetica1957TypefacesThe 1957 Swiss typeface that became the default language of postwar corporate identity.Herb Lubalin1918–1981DesignersThe New York designer who treated letterforms as characters — and rewrote expressive typography.Herbert Bayer1900–1985DesignersThe Bauhaus master who carried the movement to postwar America.Herbert Matter1907–1984DesignersThe Swiss designer who brought photomontage to American corporate design.Ikko Tanaka1930–2002DesignersThe designer who held Swiss grids and ukiyo-e colour logic in the same hand.Jan Tschichold1902–1974DesignersThe typographer who wrote the rules, then rewrote them.Jessica Walsh1986–DesignersThe RISD graduate who made partner at Sagmeister's at twenty-five, founded a studio at thirty-three, and built a global mentoring network along the way.Josef Albers1888–1976DesignersThe artist who showed that colour is never what it appears to be.Josef Müller-Brockmann1914–1996DesignersThe Swiss designer who made the grid a thinking tool, not a set of rules.Kashiwa Sato1965–DesignersThe creative director who translated Japanese retail into a global visual language.Kurt Schwitters1887–1948DesignersThe Hanover outsider who built a cathedral out of rubbish and called it Merz.Ladislav Sutnar1897–1976DesignersThe Czech-American designer who turned industrial catalogues into navigable information systems — and co-coined "information design" in the process.László Moholy-Nagy1895–1946DesignersThe Bauhaus master who made the camera a tool for design thinking.Lester Beall1903–1969DesignersThe Kansas boy who brought European modernism to the American farmer — and then to the American corporation.London Underground (Johnston, Roundel, Beck's Map)1908WorksThe world's first complete corporate identity system.Lou Dorfsman1918–2008DesignersThe CBS art director who turned a television network into a forty-year experiment in corporate typography.Louise Fili1951–DesignersThe designer who brought Italian lettering to American book jackets — and then to restaurant signs and food jars.Lucian Bernhard1883–1972DesignersThe designer who stripped the poster down to object and name.Marian Bantjes1963–DesignersThe designer who argued ornament is not a crime.Massimo Vignelli1931–2014DesignersThe designer who held the line on the grid for fifty years.Michael Bierut1957–DesignersThe Pentagram partner who reduced corporate identity to the smallest argument that still works.Michael Johnson1964–DesignersThe designer behind johnson banks — thirty years of branding work built on one principle: design has to earn its place by solving something.Milton Glaser1929–2020DesignersThe designer who made American graphic design feel like New York.Neville Brody1957–DesignersThe Face art director who made editorial typography British, expressive and unmistakably his own.New Ideas — Design After Modernism1978–1992MovementsHow the Swiss grid was dismantled, layered, and rebuilt as play.Nike Swoosh (Carolyn Davidson, 1971)1971WorksThe $35 logo that became a global brand language.Otl Aicher1922–1991DesignersThe German designer who turned corporate identity into civic infrastructure.Paul Rand1914–1996DesignersThe designer who taught corporate America that logos are systems.Paula Scher1948–DesignersThe American designer who made typography shout — and stuck the landing on identity.Peter Behrens1868–1940DesignersThe first corporate identity designer — and the teacher whose Berlin office trained the three men who would invent modern architecture.Peter Saville1955–DesignersThe designer who turned the record sleeve into a reference-saturated art object.Piet Zwart1885–1977DesignersThe Dutch typographer who built avant-garde layouts out of industrial catalogues.Ray Gun1992–2000PeriodicalsThe magazine that made illegibility a design decision.Rick Poynor1957–DesignersThe critic who gave graphic design a language for talking about itself.Rick Valicenti1951–DesignersThe Chicago designer who made typography feel like a confession.Robert Brownjohn1925–1970DesignersThe designer who turned a projector and a body into a screen — and changed what film titles could look like forever.Saul Bass1920–1996DesignersThe designer who turned opening credits into a creative commission.Seymour Chwast1931–DesignersThe co-founder of Push Pin Studios who turned wit, illustration and outrage into one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century American graphic design.Shell logo (Raymond Loewy, 1971)1904WorksThe 120-year-old corporate mark that lost its wordmark and gained recognition.Shigeo Fukuda1932–2009DesignersThe poster designer who built the perfect visual pun.Stefan Sagmeister1962–DesignersThe conceptual designer who put the body, the mind and the seven-year sabbatical onto the design agenda.Suprematism1915–1934MovementsThe Russian movement that reduced painting to geometry — and gave modernism its visual language.Swiss Style1945–1975MovementsThe movement that made the grid a universal design language.Tadanori Yokoo1936–DesignersThe poster artist who pulled ukiyo-e into the psychedelic age.The Designers Republic–2009OrganisationsSheffield's anti-corporate design studio that made the 1990s look the way the 1990s looked.The Face1980–2004PeriodicalsThe British style magazine that gave Neville Brody five years and changed editorial design.The Macintosh (1984)1984WorksThe machine that gave graphic designers a screen they could see.Theo van Doesburg1883–1931DesignersThe Dutch agitator who built De Stijl, broke with Mondrian over a diagonal line, and died designing his own house.Tibor Kalman1949–1999DesignersThe designer who insisted graphic design has something to say — and a duty to say it.U&lc (Upper and lower case)1973–1999PeriodicalsThe tabloid journal that put ITC's new typefaces in front of every designer.UnderConsiderationOrganisationsThe design-blog network that turned online commentary into the field's common room.Varvara Stepanova1894–1958DesignersThe Constructivist who turned the factory floor and the athlete's uniform into a design laboratory.Walter Herdeg1908–1995DesignersWalter Herdeg founded the first international graphic design magazine at the height of the Second World War, and edited it for forty-two years.Will Burtin1908–1972DesignersThe designer who made the invisible visible — building a walk-through human cell, one million times life size, before computers could render it.Wim Crouwel1928–2019DesignersThe Dutch designer who built the Stedelijk's visual language — one grid square at a time.Winterhouse–2013OrganisationsThe Connecticut studio that bound design practice to writing, criticism, and social good.Wolff OlinsOrganisationsThe London agency that turned branding into strategy made visible.Wolfgang Weingart1941–2021DesignersThe Swiss typographer who broke Swiss typography.Yusaku Kamekura1915–1997DesignersThe designer who gave the Tokyo 1964 Olympics its face — and in doing so, set the template for every Olympic design programme since.