• 22.10.11 - 22.01.12

Walker Art Center / Graphic Design : Now in production

This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.

Featuring work produced since 2000 in the most vital sectors of communication design, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores design-driven magazines, newspapers, books, and posters as well as branding programs for corporations, subcultures, and nations. It also showcases a series of developments over the past decade, such as the entrepreneurial nature of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of titling sequences for film and television; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives.

Graphic Design: Now in Production is the largest museum exhibition on the subject since the Walker’s seminal 1989 exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, and the Cooper-Hewitt’s 1996 comprehensive survey, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture. Appropriately, this exhibition is being developed jointly with the Cooper-Hewitt.

Curatorial Team: Ian Albinson, artofthetitle.com Andrew Blauvelt, Walker Art Center Jeremy Leslie, magCulture.com Ellen Lupton, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio, Brand New

A comprehensive, illustrated catalogue produced by the Walker Art Center accompanies the exhibition.

Tour Schedule: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis October 22, 2011–January 22, 2012

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution Summer 2012///

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