David Reinfurt

A toolkit for visual literacy in the 21st century A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses--Typography, Gestalt and Interface--provide the foundation of this book. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines. Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, György Kepes, Bruno Munari and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid- to late-20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels--treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool. David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

A New Program for Graphic Design

Lisa Strausfeld

Muriel Cooper (1925--1994) was the pioneering designer who created the iconic MIT Press colophon (or logo) -- seven bars that represent the lowercase letters "mitp" as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT's Media Lab, where she developed software interfaces and taught a new generation of designers. She began her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrant printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital. This lavishly illustrated volume documents Cooper's career in abundant detail, with prints, sketches, book covers, posters, mechanicals, student projects, and photographs, from her work in design, teaching, and research at MIT. A humanist among scientists, Cooper embraced dynamism, simultaneity, transparency, and expressiveness across all the media she worked in. More than two decades after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper's legacy is still unfolding. This beautiful slip-cased volume, designed by Yausyo Iguchi, looks back at a body of work that is as contemporary now as it was when Cooper was experimenting with IBM Selectric typewriters. She designed design's future.

Muriel Cooper

Three new graphic design courses, detailed in this volume, comprise a critical companion to Reinfurt's bestselling DIY textbook, A *New* Program for Graphic Design This volume expands David Reinfurt's uniquely pragmatic and experimental approach to pedagogy into a collaborative project that weaves together a multiplicity of voices to present a polyphonic approach to design history and teaching. Three of Reinfurt's new Princeton University graphic design courses--C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n, M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y and R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h--developed explicitly in the context of remote teaching and in light of urgent realignments around whose stories get told and who does the telling, are presented in this follow-up to A *New* Program for Graphic Design(Inventory Press/D.A.P., 2018). C-i-r-c-u-l-a-t-i-o-n examines the distribution networks for graphic design including electronic and conventional means. M-u-l-t-p-l-i-c-i-t-y, taught with mathematics professor Philip Ording, explores graphic design from the perspective of topology and topology through the practice of graphic design. R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h is an advanced graphic design class which cultivates an exploratory and expansive design process and investigates what the term ""design research"" has meant at different points in design history. From these separate angles comes a collaborative and cooperative way of telling and teaching design history, taking on subjects from the Detroit Printing Co-op, Corita Kent and Charles and Ray Eames, to Giuseppe Peano, Marshall McLuhan, Sylvia Harris and Virgil Abloh. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies and assignments that progressively build in complexity, the book serves as a practical guide to visually understanding the history--and shaping the future--of our designed world. David Reinfurtis an independent graphic designer and writer based in New York City. He worked as an interaction designer at IDEO from 1995 to 1997, where he was the lead designer for the MTA Metrocard vending machine interface. In 2000, Reinfurt formed the graphic design practice O-R-G inc., followed by Dexter Sinister in 2006 and the Serving Library in 2012. He has taught at Princeton University since 2010.

David Reinfurt

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