Why Graphic Culture Matters
Rick Poynor

Why Graphic Culture Matters gathers 45 thought-provoking essays by leading design critic Rick Poynor about graphic design and visual communication, written in the past two decades. Poynor writes as a non-designer deeply immersed in the practice of graphic communication. Many of the essays were first published in the renowned American magazine Print, where he was a columnist for 17 years. These incisive pieces – speculative, polemical and questioning – focus on key tendencies and trends, prevailing ideas and new departures. The collection is divided into three thematic sections, offering alternative critical perspectives on the field. Topics of inquiry include design’s relationship to business, design criticism, graphic design history, the canon, graphic authorship, critical graphic design, design celebrity, the urgent need to decolonise the discipline, and whether graphic design is still an apt term for what graphic communicators do.

Vital Signs: Writings on Gesture
Melissa Gordon
Foreword by Pádraic E. Moore

Vital Signs brings together writings by artist Melissa Gordon, which she has performed live over the past decade in various contexts. Focusing on the role and behaviour of gesture in her painting practice and that of others, Gordon’s texts move between topics of dropping out, (female) genius, con jobs, how one ‘speaks’ in painting, and notions of ‘suckcess’.

Gordons’ writing emerges from a history of feminist organising and editing. Vital Signs shows the development from editor to writer to stand-up performer, and the shuffling and re-combination of the texts with each performative iteration.

The selected pieces – most published here for the first time – are accompanied by full-page details of Gordon’s body of paintings titled Female Readymades, where inventories of objects, texts, letters, and gestures hang on fences and walls inside larger architectural installations.

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