This essay offers an account of one profession’s attempt to come to terms with the meaning of work in a context of economic and technological flux. Bound from the beginning to the mass-production tool of the printing press, graphic design has consistently been implicated in mechanization. For early designers — even those with no known objection to machine production — the rationalization and deskilling of work were thus unavoidable practical issues. With the emergence of modernism came a new consensus around the machine, which often wedded socialist aims of freedom and equality to productive capacities unleashed by industrial capitalism. As hopes for global revolution faded, however, accelerating industrial modernization lost its utopian glow. As I will show, changes in work processes became a site of struggle for print workers in particular. By the mid-twentieth century, as the printing trades were being transformed by technological change, the design professions were being embraced by large corporations. The austere rationalism of corporate modernism soon became a steady target for discontent about the direction of the modern world. Beginning in the late 1960s in graphic design, this discontent manifested as a series of “style wars” that culminated in postmodernism.

During the 1980s, postmodernists sought to overturn the one-size-fits-all functionalism into which modernist graphic design had settled. The coincidence of several economic, technical, and cultural forces consolidated the impact of their efforts. In 1983, Philip Meggs published the field’s first in-depth history textbook, A History of Graphic Design. Still a central text in design education, Meggs’s book established a trajectory of modernism that concluded in corporate America: a portrait of a professional establishment primed for youthful subversion.1 In 1984, Apple released the first Macintosh computer, which combined a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” visual interface with some of the earliest consumer software for page layout and image manipulation. Experiments with these new tools were documented and debated in independent design magazines like Emigre, which was published out of Berkeley, CA beginning in 1984. Finally, throughout the mid-1980s, students in graduate design programs — most centrally at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the Detroit, MI suburbs — were turning to literary and cultural theory in their search for new methods and forms. The stage was set for a broad transformation of design practice. These efforts, however, were only unevenly successful. The movement’s theoretical ambitions lost steam as postmodern style was pressed into the service of commodity differentiation during the 1990s.

This essay begins by describing the historical emergence of the design professions, with a focus on their position in an intensifying division of labor. It goes on to offer a brief account of modernist design’s dreams of industrial rationality, liberal neutrality, and reconciliation between art and commerce. I read these aims alongside transformations in the nature of industrial work during the same period, with particular attention to automation and deskilling. The essay’s main intervention then comes into focus as I reinterpret the visual and critical production of the postmodernists across two disparate contexts: the “moment of theory” in the late-twentieth century humanities and the shifting landscape of post-Fordist work. In attempting to grasp and change their practice, postmodern designer-critics often stretched theoretical reflection to the point of obscuring the social relations in which that practice continued to be embedded — neglecting, in particular, the underlying violence of deindustrialization.

In examining the vexed relationship between theoretical self-reflexivity and social domination, this essay also contributes to recent efforts to trace the rise and recuperation of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello term the “artistic critique” of capitalism.2 Graphic designers conceptualized postmodernism as a millennial liberation from constraint, routine, and hierarchy. In this they conflated modernist style with features of Fordist capitalism — a social form already in retreat by the 1980s. The postmodernist line of critique, as Boltanski and Chiapello have illustrated, in fact drew on much older traditions of resistance to capitalist work; graphic designers, however, were reluctant to conceptualize their practice in these terms. Meanwhile, print workers encountered the decline of Fordism in the form of deskilling, speedup, and the loss of shop-floor control. Those who were rendered superfluous to the new processes of print production were thus “freed” from their constrained and routinized labor — along with the wage that labor once secured. From either perspective, it was evident that the old certainties were disintegrating. […]