Drucker in context

Good e-vening, whatever time it is, I wanted to give you a very brief context on Johanna Drucker and on why we might include this history of graphic design textbook in our T&T course. First, Drucker has taught at Yale, University of Virginia, and a few other Universities; and, she is about to start at UCLA. She was an endowed Chair at UVa and worked closely with Jerome McGann there McGann, as some of you know, is a leader in digital humanities as well as literary studies [not just in one period, but multiple], and one of his many books is on the required reading list for T&T's exam list. Drucker began her illustrious career as an artist's book printer and designer. Her work is considered important in that area, and then she went on to start publishing histories of artists' books and visual poetry. She became the most important scholar in that area, and then started working more generally on information arts, and started to make the connection between artists' books and experiments in printing to new media. Her Chair at UVa was in New Media Studies. Her new position at UCLA is in Library Science. This year she is at Stanford U. I suspect from her new position she will begin to publish about digital archiving and the connection with book arts.

Why include a book artist and art historian in our course? The reason should be clear. She makes the historical lineage from the artists books and graphic design through electronic design. We live in an era when information, knowledge, and even trivial communication depends on graphic design for its expressive meaning not merely as ornamentation.

When I first came to UCF to design the doctoral program, we really did not have the pieces of the puzzle because T&T is such a new field with an emerging set of concerns and a history that is unfolding as we try to write its history.

We had the history of T&T as it relates to modes of communication (Ong, Havelock, and others), but we did not have the specific critical history to place the text. So, one could become easily confused that there was an unproblematic and simple relationship between neutral design and textual message. One could imagine that a message should limit the design to a supposedly clear unobstructed view of a given-pre-designed message. We need to remind ourselves regularly that there are problems with that argument, and that we cannot step outside history to produce a pure undesigned message.

Drucker/McVarish present a specific and detailed description of how design is not simply ornamental to messages.

The best response will be equally specific, detailed, concrete, and aware of the design as an expressive message.

If the work is as strong as module 1's then we might want to talk about publishing the results.