Jarrett Fuller

Graphic Design at NC State College of Design

This essay was written for the North Carolina State University Collge of Design 75th Anniversary. An adapated version of it appeared in an issue of DesignLife Magazine.

The term ‘graphic design’ is believed to have been coined in 1918 by a professor at the California School of Arts and Crafts. In the 1917-1918 course catalog, Frederick H. Meyer, the director of the school and one of its instructors, taught a course called “Graphic Design and Lettering”, which he described as “Lettering, Freehand, Roman and Old English; Initial letters, Monograms and Ciphers; Illuminating and Engrossing; Book-plates and Book-covers; Illustrated quotations; Title pages; Calendars; Posters; etc.” In a footnote, he continues: “Graphic Design deals with the principles of lettering and commercial work and the various processes of reproducing the drawings.”¹ The term “graphic design” was further popularized a few years later in 1922, when designer and typographer William Addison Dwiggins, in his essay New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design writes “Advertising design is the only kind of graphic design that gets home to everybody.”²

From its inception, graphic design was articulated as an activity that dealt with questions of reproduction and distribution; a field that was at once commercial and creative, and influenced by emerging technologies. The term was fitting as the industrial revolution shifted how work across the commercial arts — items listed in Meyer’s course description like monograms and posters — was made. In an attempt to separate “graphic design” from the fine arts, both Meyer and Dwiggins reference methods of distribution, industry, and technology in their definitions. In the century since the term was coined, graphic design has continued to redefine itself in the face of both technological and cultural changes whether that’s the birth of the desktop computer in the early nineties or the emergence of artificial intelligence image generators like DALL-E in the early 2020s. As such, graphic design at North Carolina State University has also been one of continual redefinition, at the forefront of emerging practices.

Though it wouldn’t get its own department until 1991, there is evidence of graphic design interest in the College of Design as far back as the 1950s (then called the “School of Design”). In 1958, the Product Design department was launched. Though that program focused on industrial design methodologies, occasional classes in graphic design principles were taught with the first “Visual Design” studio taught in 1964. (The first project in that studio was a poster for the school of design student publication art auction.) In 1970, a new undergraduate concentration in Visual Design was inaugurated for undergraduate product design majors. (An early graduate of the concentration was Richard Curtis, class of 1972, who would go on help start USA Today, where he worked with Quark and Sony to develop software to produce a daily newspaper with stories anywhere in the world. Curtis would serve as the managing editor of graphics and photography for 27 years.³)

Due to growing student interest in new graphic design principles, the designer Austin Lowrey was hired in 1979 to establish a Visual Design program as an undergraduate track within the product design department. For the first time in the College of Design, studio and core courses in graphic design were offered to students. Very quickly, student enrollment for the visual design program surpassed that of the product design concentration, forcing the hiring of new faculty to build out this new program. Alongside Lowrey, Martha Scotford, P. Lyn Middelton, Bill Deere, Meg Revelle, Steve Ater and Adam Kallish joined the visual design faculty in these early years.

By the late eighties, the visual design program was gaining recognition. Wolfgang Weingert, the famed Dutch designer, made his first of several visits to the school in 1984 and the program was profiled in Novum magazine in 1987 as part of a feature on graphic design education. In 1989, the School of Design hosted the Graphic Design Education Association National Conference on campus. At this time, it became clear that the directions of visual design and product design were diverging, causing a discussion about potentially splitting the departments.

“The two fields were at very different places. Graphic design was interested in theory and it was beginning to see itself as technologically defined,” Meredith Davis, who joined the faculty in 1989 from Virginia Commonwealth University, told me. “And industrial design was still very much thinking about mass production of functional products.”⁴ Davis, who had an undergraduate degree in education before studying design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, had experience across the design landscape from curriculum development, design practice, and academic leadership and also saw administrative benefits to a split. “The program had been run by industrial designers,” she continued, “so the visual design curriculum was ill-defined. We had graduated students who never took a typography class.” Scotford, expressing a similar feeling, told me: “Graphic design, as a field, was being developed and we felt we needed to have our own flag in the ground and stand independent of the product design department.”⁵ The Department of Product and Visual Design, as it was then known, was formerly split into two-degree programs in 1991, renaming them Industrial Design and Graphic Design, respectively. Davis was appointed the first head of the graphic design department, a position from 1991 to 1997, and then again from 1999 to 2002.

This turned out to be fortuitous timing as the 1990s were a transformational decade for graphic design and the Graphic Design program adapted with the culture. The rise of desktop publishing, with the Apple’s Macintosh and the development of software like Adobe’s Photoshop, radically shifting how graphic design was produced while also allowing for a new kind of formal experimentation. At the same time, these shifts saw an explosion in design writing and publishing. While there had been a handful of trade journals prior, by the mid-90s, there was a vibrant and thriving network of graphic design publications from trade publications like Print and Communication Arts; critical publications like Eye, Emigre, and the Looking Closer book series; and research journals like Design Issues and Visible Language. Graphic design, here, was both a commercial practice (ie. a trade done in service of clients) but also an intellectual activity (ie. a field of study with its own histories and theories). Scott Townsend, Kermit Bailey, and Andrew Blauvelt were all hired as faculty shortly after the development of the new department.

The Graphic Design department capitalized on both of these emerging trends in the field. The department originally have seven Macintosh’s in a central lab and were early in requiring students to purchase student-owned computers that were housed in the studios. Having an independent department and curriculum allowed for a more ‘defined graphic design student’. “We wanted our students to be known for typography, for problem solving, for historical understanding,” Scotford told me. “We had required courses in typography, in computer imaging and image making, and in narrative.” In the undergraduate curriculum these new courses on “imaging” were introduced including a three-class sequence on photography, digital media, and motion. (New faculty member Scott Townsend, a recent Cranbrook graduate who studied photography, introduced students to concepts like semiotics in these courses.)

In 1994, the department revised the graduate program centered around three tracks: cognition, new media, and cultural studies. In many ways, all three tracks were ahead of their time. Cognition foresaw a culture driven by my images incorporating cognitive psychology and learning theory to understand how people perceive and process information. New Media focused on the social implications of technology and predicted a future where design’s output could live across a range of media (predicting, in many ways, the rise of UX design), and Cultural Studies understood design to intersect with politics, race, and diversity. “This was the era of AIDS, Jesse Helms, and what people now call ‘critical race theory,’” faculty member Andrew Blauvelt told AIGA in 2022. “And because we were located in the Research Triangle, Duke University was nearby and was the epicenter for where these discourses were emerging. My interest was in how those critical theories shaped social action.”⁶ Furthermore, Scotford, who had previously received a grant to study women in design history, published the now-seminal essay “Messy History vs. Neat History: Toward an Expanded View of Women In Graphic Design’’ in the journal Visible Language in 1994. The Masters in Graphic Design program became what is believed to be the first design program in the country to focus on issues of class, gender, and race and how they intersect with design practice. This program, across all three tracks, served as a precursor to the contemporary discourse both around decolonization, identity, and expanded canons as well as interactivity, technology, and emerging technology one finds in design programs today.⁷

Following the graduate program redesign and recognizing design as a field of academic study, the School of Design, encouraged by then-dean Marvin Macela, launched a PhD in Design. The interdisciplinary program was only the second doctoral-level program in the country that accepted students with industrial and graphic design backgrounds⁸. Meredith Davis served as director of the program from 2005 to 2009 while concurrently serving as director of graduate programs (from 1991 to 2015). Under Davis’s guidance, the program refocused on research interest areas like learning, sustainability, methods, and urban environment. At the same time, faculty member Andrew Blauvelt served as department chair from 1997 to 1998 and then Joanie Sparado from 1998-99.

By the early 2000s, the internet began to move from a niche, technical platform or a popular communication network and along with it, opened up new areas for graphic designers: web design. The department explored early web coding and the emerging interaction design fields. In 2002, Denise Gonzales Crisp was hired after a national search as the new graphic design chair. Gonzales Crisp, who arrived via ArtCenter, pushed for a more expansive curriculum, leaning on the faculty’s expertise to shape their own classes. She initiated a designer-in-residence faculty position, with rotating designers joining the faculty to teach courses in the department, including designers like Sean Donahue, Maggie Fost, Silas Monro, and Alex Quinto.

In 2005, the department heads of both the graphic design and industrial departments — Denise Gonzales Crisp in graphic design and Brian Laffitte in industrial design — returned to faculty positions. The College of Design, under strict budget cuts from the university, decided to recombine the two programs under a new department: “Graphic Design and Industrial Design”. Santiago Peidrafita, the recently hired head of graphic design (who also had an undergraduate degree in industrial design) was appointed chair of the newly combined department. Piedrafita and Davis worked together on revising the core studio classes and the faculty started to formalize a new curriculum focused around interaction, branding, and service design. Davis proposed a series of design textbooks around the new curriculum called “Design in Context”: Davis’s Graphic Design Theory and Gonzales Crisp’s Typography were published by Thames and Hudson in 2012. In 2010, the department hosted a national conference for design educators, sponsored by AIGA called New Contexts / New Practices on campus featuring leading design thinkers like Alice Twemlow, Peter Hall, Dori Tunstall, and Julie Lasky.

The early 2010s, much like the early nineties, provided graphic design with rapid technological change: the iPhone launched in 2007 and its app store a year later led to an entirely new area of work: mobile interface design. This led to a rise in user experience and user interface design, again radically shifting the possibilities of careers in design. After Peidrafita returned to a faculty position in 2012, a national search was conducted for both graphic design and industrial design chairs. Tsai Lu Liu, an industrial design faculty member at Auburn University — one of the few other combined graphic and industrial design programs — was hired. Under Liu, an initiative to build out the department’s professional relationships and funded-research projects guided the department, including a partnership with the Cary-based software analytics firm SAS, REI, and the Library of Analytic Sciences. The SAS partnership has led to a ten-year collaboration with graphic design seniors, making it the longest-running partnership in the College of Design and has been led by faculty members Deb Littlejohn, Helen Armstrong, and Jarrett Fuller. Additionally, Matt Peterson served as co-principal investigator on a $1.34 million NSF grant on “Virtual Reality to Improve Students’ Understanding of Extremes of Scale in STEM.”

In the century since the term ‘graphic design’ was coined, the practice has evolved with each innovation in technology and the various cultural changes. Yet it has also stayed the same: it’s still concerned with methods of communication, interaction, distribution, reproduction, technology, and process. At each turning point in the design world, the graphic design department has been ready for those changes. In 2022, the department officially changed its name to “Graphic and Experience Design”, reflecting both the expanding nature of design practice and the departmental focus on designing not only objects but also interactions, services, and experiences. New courses were taught both on new technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as well as on changes in the design industry like community development, human-centered design, and media theory. The industry is once again at a turning point, both technologically and culturally and the newly-named Graphic and Experience Design program, like so many times in its history, is in the midst of changes to always reflect the future of the industry.