Professor Rick Poynor

Biography

Professor Rick Poynor is currently working as a Professor of Design and Visual Culture in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading , United Kingdom. Responsibilities: I lecture across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, and supervise BA and MA dissertations and PhD research students. Areas of Interest: My research interests in the field of graphic communication are broad and much of my writing as journalist, critic and historian has focused on the intersection of graphic design with adjacent areas of the arts and on design as a pervasive and transformative component of visual culture. I have lectured on these subjects at conferences and public events around the world and I have worked internationally as a curator of design exhibitions. I am currently researching the history and development of the relationship between photography and graphic design, both in theory and practice, in the field of print. I have a long-standing interest in self-initiated projects by graphic designers and notions of graphic authorship, in experimental modes of design practice, including critical and speculative design, and in visual communication as a means of activism. My books relating to these concerns include: Typography now: the next wave (1991), the first international survey of the new experimental typography; Typographica (2001), a study of Herbert Spencer's influential mid-century design journal; No more rules: graphic design and postmodernism (2003), a critical survey of the development, since the 1970s, of postmodern practices in visual communication; Communicate: independent British graphic design since the sixties, the catalogue for an exhibition I curated in 2004 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London; Jan van Toorn: critical practice (2008), a monograph about the politically motivated Dutch graphic designer; and Uncanny: surrealism and graphic design (2010), a catalogue for an exhibition at the Moravian Gallery in Brno. From the position of both participant and observer, I have written extensively about the development, over the past three decades, of critical approaches to graphic communication delivered by both printed and online forms of publication. I was the founding editor of Eye magazine (in 1990) and the co-founder of the Design Observer website (in 2003) and I have written an essay column for Print magazine in the US since 2000. I have taught critical writing to MA students at the Royal College of Art and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. My critical writings have been collected as Design without boundaries (1998), Obey the giant: life in the image world (2001) and Designing pornotopia (2006).

Research Interest

Areas of Interest: My research interests in the field of graphic communication are broad and much of my writing as journalist, critic and historian has focused on the intersection of graphic design with adjacent areas of the arts and on design as a pervasive and transformative component of visual culture. I have lectured on these subjects at conferences and public events around the world and I have worked internationally as a curator of design exhibitions.