Why Bruno Munari Taught Designers to Embrace Flexibility
This essay was originally published in Untapped Journal on October 20, 2025.
Like you and me, Bruno Munari (1907–1998) contained multiple selves. But mapping the Italian designer, artist, and inventor’s various outputs across the arts onto a single person seems beyond the bounds of possibility. He knew it, too. As he was fond of saying, “Everyone knows a different Munari.”
He developed educational games and wrote and illustrated children’s books. Associated with the Futurist movement, he served as the art director for various magazines, designed hundreds of book covers, and wrote prolifically about what it means to create and to see. He curated exhibitions and hosted a television program. He produced formal experiments he called “useless machines” and “unreadable books.”
This month, through his own book Design and Visual Communication (Inventory Press)—first published in 1968 and now translated into English for the first time—we get a clear glimpse inside yet another Munari identity, one that would shape the second half of his career: teaching. Translated by cultural historian and Munari scholar Jeffrey Schnapp, the book is both a practical guide and a theoretical text on visual language, the result of Munari’s time as a visiting professor at Harvard University’s then recently opened Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
It follows a similar format as Design as Art, a book Munari published two years earlier and that is still perhaps his best-known work among designers. For that title, Munari collected a series of essays on design that blended reflections on his own polymathic practice with arguments for design’s role in connecting art with the public and the everyday. Design and Visual Communication also mixes the personal and the public, but in a more approachable way.