The opening chapter in Malcolm Barnard’s 2005 Graphic Design As Communication attempts to establish the constituent functions involved within the wide-ranging practice of graphic design. The chapter aptly titled “Graphic Design and Communication” openly asks the question, “What is graphic design?” At the time of reading, the article served as the second of three “warm-up” exercises in a semester-long design research course. It was a course taken as part of my M.Des from 2007–2009. This was a time when the question was prescient, given the massive amount of change the practice would undergo throughout the 2010s continuing into the 2020s.

Barnard’sGraphic Design As Communication was the second of three essays to be read for an M.Des design research course. The purpose of three introductory essays served as prompts for the generation of design responses as a kind of warm-up and introduction to the course and process of research.

My response to Malcolm Barnard’s 2005 article Graphic Design As Communication was explored through the medium of the book, staple-bound in construction. Two pages of written text were printed on the first and second pages. These pages comprised a summary, a few paragraphs itemizing the key points of the argument of focus, and a full-page text in which personal reflections were made on the article’s strengths. The book design closed with a short half-page text in the form of an ongoing question, reflecting upon how the issues articulated by Barnard might be incorporated within my design practice. The multi-page format provided the opportunity to explore the creation of text, illustration, and collage through the scanning and manipulation of rights-managed materials.

The bulk of the book included visual material acquired from rights-free publications. Illustrations and diagrams were scanned and incorporated alongside personal drawings in vector format on each page. Through this collage-based approach of assembling visual content, I was interested in exploring methods for combing ideas from the communication models referenced within the text.

The final article can be read on Medium.