Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design

Rating:
Summary: clean new writing
Review: maud lavin deals with a complex subject in a manner that can be understood by the layperson as well as the academic. kudos to her for reminding us of an important subject that has to be continually examined. and kudos, too, for approaching it with a fresh perpective.

Rating:
Summary: Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design
Review: What is the nature of creative compromise? What and who gets compromised by whom? In this fascinating new book, Maud Lavin may focus these questions on the practice of graphic designers, but she also opens them up, in a larger way, to questions of cultural and commercial identity. Her awareness of these larger questions makes her one of the preeminent (and one of the only ) critical thinkers to write about graphic design. For Lavin, graphic design is one mode of engagement in a complex dialogue between commerce and creativity. But she is equally comfortable, here, discussing other modes of (often technological) engagement.

The book is a group of connected essays which can be read independently or as a whole. Its intended audience is broad and Lavin's writing style is clear enough to engage those unfamiliar with graphic design even while being sophisticated and intelligent enough to engage the professional designer, design historian, or art historian.

I find her essay on Kurt Schwitters and the Circle of New Advertising Designers in 1920's and 1930's Europe to be the finest which I've read on the topic. I also find her collection of interviews with women graphic designers to be particularly interesting and enjoyable. What these two essays have in common is their engagement with questions of creativity and compromise - a complex and underestimated dialectic in graphic design and one which Lavin makes uniquely evident. In bringing that evidence to bear on different forms of creativity (and different forms of compromise) - be it on the internet or in the visual politics of the abortion debate - Lavin is pushing the boundaries of both design and cultural criticism.

For that it deserves a lasting spot on my bookshelf.