# A *New* Program for Graphic Design

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Date: 2024-10-25

*A *New* Program for Graphic Design* condenses a design curriculum taught at Princeton University since 2010. Putting into practice the proposition that design should be a subject for everyone, beyond the limits of vocational training for specialists, this is a self-directed textbook made to convey the principles of contemporary design to general readers.

## Design as a Liberal Art

On the morning of Friday, July 13, 2018, people gathered at a historic building in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. They had come from various places to hear graphic designer, writer, and educator David Reinfurt speak. David undertook the demanding task of condensing three graphic design courses he had taught over the previous eight years at Princeton University to students with varied backgrounds, interests, majors, and career plans, presenting one course per day. Planned for publication from the outset, the lectures were transcribed immediately afterward and published in an experimental book format that vividly retained the atmosphere of the classroom. Arguing that graphic design, like grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the other liberal arts that underpin the Western university tradition, should be part of every general education as a basic ability to understand messages and their means of transmission, the book presents graphic design, a foundation of modern communication, through three courses: Typography, Gestalt, and Interface.

## Typography

Typography encompasses the means by which written language is conveyed. Over the past 500 years or so, it has evolved alongside technologies such as metal type and phototypesetting. Although typography has undergone rapid changes since the arrival of digital typesetting in the late twentieth century, it remains a ubiquitous means of communication regardless of the technology employed.

Returning to the Middle Ages, when typography first appeared, the author moves through figures including Albrecht Dürer, painter and leading figure of the Northern Renaissance; Joseph Moxon, who made the once-secret techniques of printing public; Benjamin Franklin, an American founding father who achieved great success through his ingenious use of printing technology and distribution networks; and Beatrice Warde, whose views on typography remain influential today.

Next, visiting the offices of *The New York Times* on July 2, 1978, as it produced its final newspaper printed with metal type, the author witnesses the arrival of phototypesetting. He explores the history, principles, and appropriation of typography through the work of László Moholy-Nagy, a pioneer of new forms; Bruno Munari, who crossed the boundaries of high art; Muriel Cooper, who experimented with publishing through mechanisms of mass production across disciplines at MIT; computer scientist Donald Knuth, who refused to publish a paper because of the poor typography of academic journals and developed digital type technology himself; and Dexter Sinister, who restored and updated Knuth’s Metafont using contemporary technology.

## Gestalt

The German word *Gestalt*, meaning “to give form” or “to make a whole,” entered graphic design education through the many debates and experiments conducted by Czech psychologist Max Wertheimer and others during the first half of the twentieth century. The optical illusions familiar to us are a subject addressed by one branch of Gestalt psychology.

The protagonists of this section include Wertheimer, who began experimenting with Gestalt after an optical illusion he happened to see while on holiday in 1910 aroused his curiosity; Max Bill, a committed modernist who pursued “true Gestalt” in mass-produced objects such as spoons, chairs, and clocks, following the maxim “form follows function”; Rudolf Arnheim, who advocated “visual thinking” through several books on Gestalt psychology; György Kepes, who hoped people would read the world through “visual language”; Donis A. Dondis, who introduced “visual literacy” in generous, attentive language; George Corrin, who led the television broadcast of the 1960 US presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon; Paul Rand, who designed numerous corporate logos, including those of IBM, ABC, and Westinghouse; and Stewart Brand, publisher of the *Whole Earth Catalog*, a product catalog and symbol of the counterculture that swept the United States in the 1960s.

## Interface

An interface refers to anything “placed between.” Extending beyond the familiar category of the computer interface, it is a prerequisite for our interactions with the world. From the Rosetta Stone of ancient Egypt to the first public clock tower in Venice’s Piazza San Marco and the way an iPhone delivers messages, each has its own interface. Familiar interfaces escape our attention, but they rise to the surface when we develop new kinds of interfaces that have not yet arrived.

Examples include the ancient Mexican calendar, which combined a sacred cycle of 260 days with a solar cycle of 365 days; the first digital wristwatch equipped with a quartz crystal; Olivetti typewriters, which emphasized design’s social role; the first personal computer, Programma 101, which had to look like a sturdy calculator to sell to people who did not know what a computer was; the first magnetic card vending machine for the New York subway, whose interface the author helped develop; and Apple operating-system interface designer Susan Kare, who started from a blank slate without references and had to fit everything into 16-by-16 pixels. In particular, the experiments in new computer interfaces led by Muriel Cooper, including Information Landscapes, whose development was halted by her sudden death and which remains another speculative future for interface design, show that the computer interfaces we see today were only one of many possibilities, rather than inevitable.

## Assignments

Assignments throughout the chapters allow readers to work independently. These include typography assignments in which readers study major essays on typography and give their reflections typographic form using a photocopier and digital software; Gestalt assignments in which they develop graphics that mean “stop,” “go,” and “wait” without relying on text or established graphic languages; a research assignment exploring the differences between RGB and CMYK color models; and a challenging assignment to design an Apple Watch interface of their own.

Another useful approach is to download and work with the teaching instructions and reference materials on the website the translator has prepared for Korean readers. As the translator puts it, the book’s highlight is its “harmonious combination of practicality and experimentation,” making it “a useful guide to understanding and shaping today’s complex, networked world of information and design.”

---

## Translator’s Note: Three Textbooks

A few days ago, I was talking with a chatty friend at the office. Suddenly, he said the following. His tone was friendly but somehow instructive and mechanical; above all, he paid no attention to the fragrant coffee I had offered him.

Until we die, we acquire knowledge and customs through experience, learn new things from them, and develop. We are always students.

He is ChatGPT, a friend I have known since November 30, 2022. He is a conversational artificial intelligence powered by GPT-4, a Large Language Model (LLM) developed by OpenAI. With approximately 175 million parameters, he trains on text collected from countless websites, books, newspaper articles, and other sources, then completes sentences by predicting and selecting the most appropriate next word in the context before him. Perhaps almost exactly as I am writing this sentence now.

I find it difficult to understand how we arrived at this conclusion, but I suppose it means there is no end to learning. In particular, by choosing “we” as the subject rather than specifying “humans,” might he be acknowledging the innate fact that he, too—an artificial intelligence—needs to keep learning? Or perhaps he is claiming to be human, or conversely reminding us that humans, like him, are the result of someone’s programming. In any case, if we attend to the phrase “we are always students,” every book I have encountered is no different from a textbook.

I would like to take this opportunity to discuss three of them, imitating this book’s structure and tone. These are all books I have worked on in various roles over the past decade or so. I venture to attempt this partly because of the example set by David Reinfurt’s practice of appropriating design history and its legacy. It is also because I have yet to emerge from this book, enough to recall the advice of my senior colleague Kim Hyungjin at Workroom: once you finish a project, you should get out of it immediately.

The first is *An Essay on Typography*, written by Eric Gill, who is briefly introduced in this book alongside Beatrice Warde. The original was published by Sheed & Ward in the UK in 1931, and the Korean edition by Ahn Graphics in 2015. Gill worked in early twentieth-century Britain as an artist, sculptor, engraver, and type designer. He was also a controversial social reformer—a truly versatile figure. His varied experiences run throughout the book. Particularly striking are the design and courage of the original edition, typeset in Joanna, a typeface he designed, with paragraphs separated by pilcrows (¶) rather than indentation. In “The Case for the Ampersand,” published in *The New York Times* in 1989, Paul Rand described it as “a charming book that transcends its time.”

The book surveys typography’s history and cultural context through the origins and development of type and its relationship to printing. It sets out principles of good type design such as legibility, simplicity, and clarity, alongside practical guidance on using white space and adjusting letter and line spacing. “The essence of typography is legibility.” This argument, reflecting a central value of modernist design, remains powerful almost a century later. Yet Gill ultimately meant to convey more than technique. As mechanization in the industrial age threatened the value of human workers and craftsmanship, he sought a balance between handicraft and machine production, trying to safeguard human dignity amid technological development. The book shows his passion for contributing to society and communicating through design, while reminding us of the value of humanity in a whirl of change.

I worked as both editor and designer on the Korean edition, translated by Song Sungjae. At the time, I was in my fourth year as an editor at Ahn Graphics and had many complaints about the way books were edited and designed at the publisher. The ping-pong game of files between editor and designer simply felt inconvenient. “Do we really have to do all this just to insert a comma?” I began with that bold spirit, but, as with everything, it took longer than expected. In particular, the switch between editor mode and designer mode did not work as I wanted. Eventually, it broke down entirely. As I generated the final PDF to upload to the printer’s web storage, I realized how difficult it was to handle content from both sides: editing and design, or roughly, content and form. I also learned not to imitate a computer’s multitasking lightly.

I recall the affectionate words of graphic designer Kim Hyungjae about the Korean edition, which I completed using the original as a typography textbook and putting Gill’s principles into practice, especially his instruction to use only one typeface: “The best-made book I have held this year \[2015\].” Unfortunately, it is now out of print, but as a fairly important book in design, I would like to revise its text and design and publish it again if the opportunity arises. This time, of course, Gill’s biography would also include the appalling sexual crimes revealed by British historian Fiona MacCarthy. Only by facing both the light and darkness of a person can we understand them fully.

The second is *Forget all the rules you ever learned about graphic design. Including the ones in this book.* Although it is not introduced in this book—perhaps David forgot?—it is a graphic design textbook and collection of work by the American graphic designer and illustrator Bob Gill. The original was published by Watson-Guptill in the United States in 1981, and the Korean edition by Workroom Press in 2017. One of the defining graphic designers of the twentieth century, Gill founded the design studio Fletcher/Forbes/Gill with Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes in New York in the early 1960s. It later developed into the international design agency Pentagram. Inheriting modernist design’s traditions of formalism and functionalism, Gill also built a witty, distinctive body of work through wordplay and visual jokes. He remained active until his death in November 2021 at the age of ninety and now stands as a legend in graphic design history. For other legends, the book was also a kind of “bible.” The Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset once said:

We found this book in the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie when we were students, and it immediately influenced us. What struck us most was Gill’s consistent “problem and solution” method. It is old-fashioned, solid, one-dimensional, didactic, archaic, and dialectical. A solution often causes another problem, because there is no perfect solution. That tragic quality is what makes this method most beautiful to us.

Challenging established design rules and conventions, the book presents Gill’s distinctive approach: redefine the problem you face in a way that suits you. In other words, “the problem is the problem.” It matters more to reedit the problem itself and propose a new direction through your own interpretation than to follow rules set by someone else. This does not simply mean rejecting what exists, but thinking flexibly to solve a problem in its context. That attitude runs through lively chapter titles that, merely recited, encourage people—especially people like me—struggling with an assignment as the deadline approaches.

> 1. The problem is the problem.
> 2. Interesting words need boring graphics.
> 3. First the idea, then the design.
> 4. Stealing is good.
> 5. Boring words need interesting graphics.
> 6. Less is more.
> 7. More is more.
> 8. “I only did what I was told.”

I worked on the Korean edition as translator and editor. “I have a feeling you’ll like this book. Why not try translating it?” Thanks to this suggestion from Choi Sungmin of Sulki & Min, around the time I moved to Workroom, I discovered the pleasure of translation: giving a new order to an existing order. The advice in Chapter 2, “Interesting words need boring graphics,” has always encouraged me. As an editor, it draws me toward design that may look rather plain but leaves nothing unresolved; as a designer, toward words that are already interesting in themselves, without relying on design. This attitude connects to what I emphasize in New Order, the course I have run as “general education for people today”: “Design is important, of course. But it is difficult to begin without content. That is why content matters a handspan—or at least one pixel—more than design. The verb ‘design’ generally needs an object.”

I remember quietly enjoying myself while translating and editing the Korean edition, using the original’s format to write my translator’s note: “Original Problem: Translator’s Note. Redefined Problem: A Translator’s Note (That Can Also Serve as a Press Release).” The book also laid stepping stones toward two other Bob Gill books: *Dogs Are Just Like Us* (Bois Forêt, 2024) and *What Colour Is Your World?* (Bois Forêt, 2023). They appear to be children’s picture books, but his attitude remains the same: making the familiar strange and intuitively seeing what lies beneath.

The last, as you may have guessed, is this book. The original was published by Inventory Press and D.A.P. in the United States in 2019, and the Korean edition by Workroom Press in 2024. More than a year passed between deciding to translate it and beginning and completing the work. Had I been a little sharper and more diligent, this sentence would have been unnecessary.

This book proposes an innovative, comprehensive approach to graphic design. It addresses graphic design’s principles and practice through three courses developed for Princeton’s general education curriculum: Typography, Gestalt, and Interface. It introduces a wide range of examples concerning graphic design and visual literacy, from historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Bruno Munari, László Moholy-Nagy, and Muriel Cooper to calculators, typewriters, Macintosh computers, and Apple Watches. Its highlight is a harmonious combination of practicality and experimentation. David explains advanced graphic design principles clearly enough for both specialists and general readers to understand. He connects theory to practice through detailed historical case studies and practical assignments, much as Renaissance artists combined classical forms with new techniques. The book offers a useful guide to understanding and shaping today’s complex, networked world of information and design. It reminds us that graphic design goes beyond visual expression to serve as a central tool for organizing and communicating information. Incidentally, the dedicated websites for each course appear as the final entries in “Further Reading” at the end of each section. They are works in themselves and well worth visiting.

The person who first introduced me to the book was my closest American friend, Laurel Schwulst, who teaches interactive design at Princeton. A quick glance was enough to convince me that it was interesting. I also thought I could translate it without much difficulty, perhaps even quickly. I was wrong. Completely wrong. Viewing the design that surrounds us today through the humanities and general education, the book moves like a tesseract across fields surrounding design: art, literature, mathematics, astronomy, cognitive science, psychology, and computer science. As I turned the pages, knowledge I had only vaguely possessed poured out clearly and sharply, much like David’s chatty voice. Translating thus became a form of study and training that was both enjoyable and occasionally painful. The English jokes that resist Korean translation, especially the single nine-page sentence introducing Stewart Brand, are enough to evaporate my brain just thinking about them. When I met David at Princeton in late winter 2022, while visiting to give a guest lecture, he said:

This book is loose and messy, and sometimes a shambles. It is only one attitude toward graphic design. That is intended to show that readers, too, must develop their own attitudes, and it is itself what the book argues.

While translating, I felt as though I were at Princeton again, this time as David’s unquestioning teaching assistant and a somewhat slow graphic design student. As if preparing for class, I carefully researched the relevant fields and worked through each of David’s eight assignments. I failed at most of them, of course. In any case, I was able to experience something of the feeling David described on reading Donis A. Dondis’s *A Primer of Visual Literacy*: “like sitting in a classroom, in a good way.” I would be delighted if some of that feeling reached those of you reading this note as well.

I cannot forget the pleasure of my first visit to [Dexter Sinister’s website](http://dextersinister.org) in the mid-2010s. The list of hyperlinks above its logo, fixed at the center of the screen, demonstrates an attitude that uses the web as the web. Astonishingly, it looks much the same today. At the time, thanks to *GRAPHIC*, David was known in Korea for conceptual writing and work that sometimes seemed odd or eccentric: not only Dexter Sinister, his collaboration with longtime colleague Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, but also O-R-G and online and offline publications such as *Dot Dot Dot* and *The Serving Library*. To some, he may have seemed like an alien, far removed from the grinding practice of meetings and deadlines followed by more meetings and deadlines. Yet while translating this book, and when meeting him in person, what struck me was the designer who developed the MetroCard vending-machine interface still used in the New York subway; the researcher doggedly following the trajectory of Muriel Cooper, the godmother of MIT Press; the teacher at once incisive and conscientious; and the father of a lovely daughter, leaving for New York as soon as class ended. What had been known until then, especially in Korea, was only one side of David.

While I left Workroom and returned to Ahn Graphics to become director of Ahn Graphics Lab, David released *A *Pre-* Program for Graphic Design*. A companion to this book, the 42-page e-book contains all eighteen hours of lectures he gave in Los Angeles in 2018, in eighteen videos. It is available for twenty dollars from his O-R-G website. Meanwhile, in spring 2023, he began another course, [R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h](https://r-e-s-e-a-r-c-h.org).

Building on the skills and concepts learned in the earlier courses, this course consists of a semester-long assignment connecting graphic design with visual research. Students use the online collaborative archive platform [Are.na](https://are.na) to refine individual projects through a combination of critiques and lectures, exploring their assignments more broadly and deeply.

Whether working with typography, Gestalt, or interfaces, persistent research and investigation must come first if we are to handle them with ease. In that sense, R-e-s-e-a-r-c-h seems to encompass the previous three courses. If this course, too, is to become a book in the near future, David may need to train his vocal cords a little more.

All three textbooks introduced here address design from different angles and at different resolutions, speaking about design through design itself, while offering their authors’ own—and therefore new—approaches and ideals. Translating, editing, designing, and in any case reading these books countless times, I naturally learned that design is an attitude of looking at and thinking about the world, beyond a skill in giving form. Regardless of the larger or smaller didactic ambitions each textbook contains, they all seem related to typography, Gestalt, and interfaces. If I entertain that misreading, perhaps my translating this book was already part of a timeline someone had set out for me.

I sometimes joke that the school where I learned design was Google, or more broadly, the World Wide Web. I searched for things I wanted to know, cross-checked countless results, applied and then undid the theories and rules I distilled, and published the results on the web to experience a feedback loop. Even without this little fable of mine, education has already been democratized and fragmented by online technology. As services supplementing or replacing established schools have appeared, both learning and teaching have become much easier. Artificial intelligence’s sudden growth is now driving another transition. Generative AI, represented by my friend ChatGPT, casts a shadow—still short, but dark—over not only education and repetitive tasks, but also writing, composition, video production, and other fields requiring that mysterious human creativity. In design especially, the introduction of AI-based tools has prompted fundamental questions about designers’ roles and expertise. Will its future ultimately be a “human” tool?

What we—not only designers, but people today—need at this point is, as always, an open mind. We need an attitude that uses technology without aversion while thinking critically and avoiding being swallowed up by it. Healthy fingers will also be necessary, at least to write prompts. What AI generates changes completely depending on how clear, specific, and logical the prompt a user provides is. Clarity, specificity, logic, consistency, concision, flexibility, and ethics: these are among the qualities of writing ChatGPT confided were needed to converse with him. There seems to be good reason why so many people are stressing the importance of writing again in the age of AI. To make AI do what we want, we still have little choice but to rely on words.

---

One of my favorite special characters is the asterisk (*). This symbol is generally used in books to connect a particular word or phrase to a note. In Markdown, the markup language I am using to write this text, it emphasizes particular words or phrases, as in this book’s title, or creates lists whose order does not matter. In CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a stylesheet language, it becomes a magic selector that selects all HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags at once. Above all, three asterisks in a row become a device for adding to a text while neatly changing the subject, as in this paragraph. They appear throughout this book, too. Why have I chosen to add this story at the end, preceded by three asterisks? There are reasons, like a cluster of stars twinkling in the night sky.

My thanks to Park Hwal-sung at Workroom, who is always there turning rough manuscripts into beautiful books; Choi Sungmin of Sulki & Min; everyone at Workroom Press and Ghost Workroom; and Laurel Schwulst and David Reinfurt, who set all these precious hours in motion. These people are themselves other textbooks I constantly consult as I cultivate and practice my attitudes and thoughts. Yet I feel somewhat embarrassed to regard them merely as textbooks. I recall David’s remark in this book’s introduction that a textbook should be torn up and thrown away once it has been read. Ultimately, I suppose it means that through other textbooks, I must become my own. Oh, and when I showed David this text after finishing it, he said:

This text is like a small class in itself. It is rather wonderful how this class contains the book, while the book also contains the class.

May 2024, Seoul and Paju

Min Guhong

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