Through Set Margins’ publications, design practitioners and theorists release their work. From notable writers such as Kenneth FitzGerald who have been active for decades, to practitioners like Matt Owens who established successful studios out of a DIY attitude, Set Margins’ overviews design and culture in articulating and discussing past belonging and present challenges: grassroots, practice based and hands-on.
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We’d like to highlight a few new and recent titles.
Fracture: Japanese Graphic Design 1875–1975 by Ian Lynam is a groundbreaking, profusely illustrated, dynamically designed, and easy-to-read survey of Japanese graphic design history.
In The Design Comedy, a paraphrase of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Otto von Busch, a pitiful design professor, searches for the design workshop at Parsons. Proving inaccessible, the lost professor falls into despair. However, a recently fired workshop technician, Virgil, appears to know the way. They descend the crumbling corridors of design’s collapse, through the ruins and anguish of broken promises, failed research, self-absorbed design theorists, and hypocritical designers, to the very nadir of design’s inferno.
How Many Female Type Designers Do You Know? by Yulia Popova is a pioneering appraisal of female typographers, with historical research and interviews with contemporary practitioners.
A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity and the Business of Design by Matt Owens is a design guidebook that speaks to students, educators, and seasoned professionals, as it provides tactical strategies & creative support to tackle the complexities of balancing intuition and taste, technical and personal capability, strategic business decisions in design work and the demands of modern brand building.
Volumes: Design Reviewed Remixed Revealed by Kenneth FitzGerald explores the dynamics of volume in graphic design, from vernacular expressions to professional practice, featured in critical essays, reviews, speculations, polemics, incitements and fictions, from 1990’s to the present.
Steve: A Framework for AI and Identity Design by Melani De Luca maps out what AI brings to graphic design, and to identity design in particular. It offers support to designers seeking practical advice, ethical frameworks and more.
Through Witnessing—Threading the critiquing, making, teaching of design by Nida Abdullah, Chris Lee and Xinyi Li (eds.) names and wrestles with design and institutional design education’s pseudo-neutral relationship with colonial capitalist world orders and what it means to teach and design today.
All books on sale via setmargins.press and local bookstores.
Finally: Set Margins’ is open to publishing proposals, just check their website or send an email.
P.S. ON DISTRIBUTION: Our books are available through Artbook/D.A.P. in North America, Perimeter books for Australia, Public Knowledge Books for UK and Idea Books in continental Europe and pretty much everywhere not mentioned before.
