My 2009 photographic study How began as an extension of my galaxies within series. My intent with this study was to reveal unseen wonders within the everyday practice of graphic design.
In her 1998 essay, Design and Production in the Mechanical Age, design writer Ellen Lupton heightens the reader's awareness to the means of production of contemporary graphic design. She writes, “Most critical literature on graphic design looks past the question of production, approaching the printed surface as a smooth and glassy plane on which float disembodied marks and images…Understood from within the narrower perspective of production, however, typography is the organization of prefabricated letters—produced by a metal or wood relief, paper stencil, photographic negative, or digital signal…Our bottomless appetite for images has been fed with printed pictures, whose uniformity of surface and flexibility of scale obscure the differences among physical artifacts.”
How presents photographs of graphic design obtained through a powerful microscope lens. By documenting visual artifacts left by production methods, the resulting images disclose endless moments of visual beauty that are unconsciously created by graphic designers. How reveals hidden graphic compositions found in one corner of one page of How Magazine. Halftone dots bleed into what could be textile patterns of seeming exactitude; ink saturated paper fibers contain the light of cathedral windows; digitally rendered letterforms reveal echoes of hand craft.
Marshall McLuhan famously stated that the medium is the message. How reveals that the message of graphic design consists of unnoticed labors, methodical precision, unfathomable craft, and an almost scientific attention to detail.
