Volumes: Design Reviewed Remixed Revealed explores the dynamics of volume in graphic design, from vernacular expressions to professional practice, featured in critical essays, reviews, speculations, polemics, incitements and fictions. This remixed edition of Kenneth FitzGerald’s 2010 book features over 30 texts spanning 25 years.
We caught up with Kenneth to recommend some of the books that have influenced him.
Volumes is a revised, expanded version of my first book of writings Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art and Culture. It’s a collection of essays, polemics, reviews, and fictions about and around graphic culture with music as side-topic and comparator with design. The core of the collection is essays that first appeared in Emigre magazine, then about a third of the essay were written especially for the book. It spans over a decade and a half of my writing, from 1997 to 2010.
I’ve tried to signal that the contents are unconventional and irreverent about design and that I’m invoking (and evoking) popular music, specifically their overlap in album covers. As the book is a reworking of and addition to a previous title, I’ve used different typefaces to differentiate between the original and added texts. Overall, I’m trying to model the rhetoric and physicality of design. I hope readers come away having been entertained by the writing with a more expansive, diverse and personal appreciation of design activity.
The book that most influenced you while working on these esssays
I’ve written a lot about Bangs and his influence on me. His writing is an apt model for design criticism— both popular music and graphic design are frequently trashy yet profound. Most importantly, Bangs always addresses the lived experience of music, not as an abstraction.
Your favorite book of design essays
Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time by Natalia Ilyin
I’d already been writing for a decade when this collection was published. It was simultaneously humbling and invigorating, intimidating and inspiring. It informed me how far I still had to go to produce criticism near as insightful, engaging and personal—and it was very far. That Natalia name-checked me in her Writing for the Design Mind was a surprise validation that I might be making up some of that distance.
A non-design book that has influenced how you write
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey
Here again is a writer embracing and unpacking the profound in the quotidian and versa vice. All my writing can be seen as attempts to rewrite his essay “Frivolity and Unction.”
A fiction book that has influenced your work/thinking
Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard
Not a work of fiction but a book about fiction. Dillard’s adventures in the love of reading opened my mind to a wealth of literature: books I formerly found unreadable became treasures. While I take issue with some of her attitudes about fine art, her use of one creative medium to reveal another stuck with me.
A book more designers should read
Design and the Creation of Value by John Heskett
Any designer that has cited business as host or definer for graphic design activity must read this book. In other words, all designers. Heskett deftly explains economic theory and why it is futile for graphic designers to expect acknowledgement from and inclusion in the business world. Sorry, it ain’t happening and Heskett tells you why.
A forgotten book from your personal library you wish more people knew about
Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us by Walt Kelly
For those unfamiliar with this iconic comic strip, think a politically engaged Calvin and Hobbes that never leaves the universe of Spaceman Spiff. Kelly’s observations are, unfortunately, always relevant, googolplexly so now. The title coinage is only one of Kelly’s apothegms deservedly embedded in our lexicon. (That I write sentences like that comes from Kelly’s dialog, though it likely isn’t apparent.) I only rate one higher in its perspicacity and universality, Porky Pine’s dictum that “All’s well that ends.”
A book readers should turn to after reading Volumes
Design against Design: Cause and Consequence of a Dissident Graphic Practice by Kevin Yuen Kit Lo
If my book can serve as conduit to this one, it’ll have served the design discipline well. Kevin is the rare designer living and working his principles of resistance and community. In this recent book, he’s clearly confronting the challenges and rewards of a nonconformant practice.
(Read our Further Reading feature with Kevin)
An book you’re excited to read next
Fracture: Japanese Graphic Design 1875–1975 by Ian Lynam
I already want the next installment bringing us to today, even though I’ve yet to get to this one or know if a sequel is planned. Having such a sharp critical mind take on a history makes me sure I’ll be reading an exemplary study on the specific topic and a protype for other such studies. (Read our recent interview with Ian about Fracture)
