Graphic Design : The New Basics, revised and updated

About the book

"A longstanding excellent primer, in an equally excellent updated edition."-Print Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips's celebrated introduction to graphic design, available in a revised and updated edition. Graphic Design: The New Basics explains the key concepts of visual language that inform any work of design. A foundational graphic design book for students, Lupton and Phillips explore the formal elements of design through visual demonstrations and concise commentary. From logos to letterhead to complex website design, this is a graphic design book for everyone, no matter your design project or focus. Topics include: * Color * Texture * Rhythm and balance * Hierarchy * Layers * Grids * And much more! The new revised edition features new chapters on: * Visualizing data * Typography * Modes of representation * Gestalt principles Sixteen new pages of student and professional work covering such topics as working with grids and designing with color make this a course adoption favorite in any graphic design program and graphic design school. Graphic Design: The New Basics is an invaluable introduction to the field of graphic design from two accomplished designers and design educators.

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Ellen Lupton Biography

Ellen Lupton (born 1963) is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic, and educator. Known for her love of typography, Lupton is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at Maryland Institute College of Art. Previously she was the Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and was named Curator Emerita after 30 years of service. She is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. degree program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has written numerous books on graphic design for a variety of audiences. She has contributed to several publications, including Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis, and The New York Times.

Early life and education

Lupton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1963 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parents divorced in 1973 when she and her twin sister, Julia, were ten years old. As a self-professed "art girl" from a family of English teachers, her love of typography combined her love of art and writing.Lupton attended Cooper Union College in 1981 as a fine art student, where she discovered graphic design and the "expressive potential of typography." Lupton described this discovery of graphic design as "a revelation... Design really wasn't in the mainstream back then. It was esoteric. It was the thing you did if you were very 'neat,' which I wasn't.”

Career

After graduating, Lupton was offered a position as curator of the newly-founded Cooper Union Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. This combined her long-standing interests in writing and design in her first curatorial position. With an interest in the do-it-yourself movement, Lupton took advantage of limited resources to visually construct the history of graphic design, surprising peers in her ability to meld the visual and verbal. These exhibits provided an arena in which "objects, images, and text functioned as both the method of communication and the subject of inquiry." At this time, Lupton began to write critically about typography and design, utilizing a post-structuralist framework to understand how design is embedded in political, economic, and social contexts, saying, "Typography and architecture are not neutral containers for the content or programs they are thought to neatly accommodate. These are fundamental insights of modern and post-modern thinking." She has cited Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault as informing her (albeit more populist) work.In 1992, Lupton joined Cooper Hewitt as curator of contemporary design and began writing books about the design world. She ended her tenure as curator in 2022 and received the honorary designation as curator emerita.In 1997, Lupton became a chair of the undergraduate graphic design program at MICA. She served in this role until 2002. In 2003, she launched a new MFA program in graphi ... Read full biography