Deconstruction

“Theory” and “graphic design” have always been a problematic union. Perhaps because graphic design is often approached more intuitively than intellectually, theory is rarely an explicit part of design practice. When theory does emerge as a topic among designers, it often serves to name a new style, a current stock of mannerisms. A conspicuous example of this surfacing of theory is the circulation of “deconstruction” with the graphic design community.

The term “deconstruction” was coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. Deconstruction became a banner for advanced thought in American literary studies, scandalizing departments of English and French across the country.

A work of design can be called “deconstruction” when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing, interrupting the sacred “inside” of content with the profane “outside” of form. Modernist typography has long engaged in such structural games from the calligrammes of Apollinaire, to the experiments with simultaneous overlapping texts produced within the “New Typography” of the 1970s and ‘80s. Such self-conscious explorations of language and design within the context of Modernism are matched by numerous developments within the “vernacular” field of commercial publishing, which since the nineteenth century has expanded the limits of classical book typography to meet the needs of advertising and popular media. The early nineteenth-century display face called Italian deliberately inverted the anatomical part so the “modern” letterforms that had been formalized in the late eighteenth century. The neoclassical fonts of Didot and Bodoni epitomized the tendency to view typography as a system of abstract relationships – thick and think, serif and stem, vertical and horizontal. The designer of Italian turned the serfs inside out, demonstrating that the forms of letters are not bound by the authority of divine proportions, but are open to endless manipulation.

Within the context of philosophy and literary theory, deconstruction is just one question among many that emerged out of the body of critical ideas known as post-structuralism. Barthes’ theory of “mythology” looks at how images validate key beliefs in modern culture – such as “progress” or “individualism” – making ideologically loaded concepts seem like natural and inevitable truths.