|
LDR Home
Books
CDs
Events/Exhibits
Film/Video
|
Graphic Design Timeline: A Century of Design Milestones
By Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit
Allworth Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2000.
ISBN 1-58115-064-4.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart , IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
History is necessarily an abstraction. It is not what happened in the past, but rather the selective interpretation of what happened in the past. No wonder then that, as John W. Gardner said, "history never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable." It is interesting that one of the effects of a timeline (a sequential listing of events) is a partial return to the messiness of the original time period. At the very least, timelines complicate the chain of cause and effect that historians carefully work to unearth. In this chronology-which consists of a double-page annual list, from 1890 to 2000, of births, deaths and the major developments in such categories as graphic arts, advertising, education, consumables, arts and culture, industrial design, technology, typography, and so on-it feels like a ludicrous dadaist trick to find that occurring together in 1957, for example, were such incompatibles as the invention of Velcro, the launching of Sputnik, the publications of The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss and On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the release of Adrian Frutiger's typeface Univers, and (twice listed) the death of the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde. Or that Xerography, nylon, the ballpoint pen, and Elsie the Cow were all invented in 1938. Despite or because of the jolts that result from such "radical juxtapositions," this account of the year-to-year growth of design (illustrated throughout) could serve as a rich and invaluable text for college-level courses in design history.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)
top
|
