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Lost in Translation: The Emergence and Erasure of 'New Thinking' within Graphic Design Criticism in the 1990s

This paper revisits the early 1990s, a period when journals in the field of graphic design (such as Eye magazine) first introduced the idea of a ‘postmodern’ approach to its British audiences. In this period, postmodern graphic design was strongly associated with the ’new thinking’ of American graphic design and only American writers were considered capable of speaking to the topic. In the process of describing emergent practices at Cranbrook Academy of Art, for example, Ellen Lupton (1991) argues for a distinction to be made between intellectual (post-structuralist) and superficial (postmodern) approaches to visual form. A substantive finding of this paper, however, is that her nuanced account was superseded by oversimplified understandings of postmodernism in graphic design, which have tended to use key historical sources in highly selective ways. With accuracy and depth of scholarship, this paper re-visits a seminal text from the period, The New Discourse, in which Cranbrook alumni self-consciously discuss their innovative approach to 2-dimensional design. This paper provides a close analysis of their treatise on postmodernism and, in the process, assembles information in innovative ways. The reading demonstrates how the Cranbrook approach is underpinned by a wide range of philosophical constitutions, with the (seemingly) contradictory impulse of phenomenology, in particular, making a dominant contribution to the account. In this way, the paper enhances knowledge about what constitutes ‘new thinking’ in America in the early 1990s and has proved valuable to readers of the journal. The paper has appeared in the top 30 ‘most read’ articles between March and May 2012 and is currently 21st on the most read list for the Journal. The Journal of Design History is published by Oxford Journals and has over 3000 subscribers internationally (mostly universities). It plays an active role in the development of design history.