Designing History

Published by Set Margins’

Documents and the Design Imperative to Immutability. Moving beyond the usual genres of form endemic to graphic design’s canonical history, Designing History proposes a design history that centers bureaucratic instruments like money, passports, certificates, property deeds, and more. Such documents produce identity, assign ownership, grant permission, and ascribe value. They stabilize claims, memory, and knowledge that would otherwise be vulnerable to contestation or obliteration. Despite their apparent banality, such documents are perhaps graphic design’s most profoundly consequential forms.