Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor was born in 1957 in the UK. He studied at Newcastle Polytechnic in the late 1970s and began his career writing about design rather than practising it — a distinction he has maintained throughout.

He worked for Blueprint magazine through the 1980s, covering architecture and graphic design at a time when both were beginning to attract serious cultural attention. In 1990 he founded Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design, a quarterly journal conceived on the model of serious art and architecture criticism. He edited Eye until 1997, producing twenty-four issues.

Through the 1990s he lectured at the Royal College of Art in London and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and wrote for Eye, Print, Blueprint and Creative Review. His 1991 book Typography Now, co-edited with Edward Booth-Clibborn, surveyed the wave of experimental typography that had followed the Macintosh — the first critical account of what would later be framed as postmodern graphic design.

In 2000 he was a principal instigator of First Things First 2000, a restatement of Ken Garland’s 1964 manifesto, published simultaneously in Emigre, Eye, Adbusters, Print and the AIGA Journal. In 2003 he published No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism and co-founded Design Observer with Michael Bierut, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.

What distinguishes Poynor from most design writers of his era is that he built a critical practice rather than a commentary practice. The trade press covered new work; Poynor interrogated it. Where most design writing of the 1980s and 1990s ran to monographs and promotion, his essays applied the tools of cultural journalism: historical context, theoretical framing, direct argument.

His central subject has been graphic design’s relationship with postmodernism. No More Rules (2003) sets out how postmodern theory entered design practice — how the work of Neville Brody, David Carson, Emigre and the CalArts graduate programmes responded to Derrida, Barthes and Lyotard, whether or not the designers themselves would have used those names.

First Things First 2000 showed a different side of his role. The manifesto itself was Ken Garland’s text reworked; what Poynor contributed was the decision to coordinate simultaneous publication across Emigre, Eye, Adbusters, Print and the AIGA Journal — giving it an amplification that a single-journal piece could not have had.

Through Eye and Design Observer he also built the structural conditions for serious design criticism to survive: editing, commissioning and publishing work that practitioners, historians and educators continue to draw on.