“No More Heroes: Why is design history so obsessed by appearance?“
Essay discussing design history as taught with the stories of design heroes versus context.
"It is taken for granted that graphic designers will be familiar with the history of the discipline and that they will know what Milton Glaser’s posters or Herbert Bayer’s typography look like. But how does this ‘look’ inform or help us, apart from functioning as a ‘naming of the parts’, or as a store of outdated visual clichés? Why do we need it, and do we even need it? Is it time to question what kind of history is actually being fed to us?"
"We need to explain not ‘what it looks like’ but ‘why it looks the way it does’, how a piece of graphic design communicated and to whom."
http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/no-more-heroes
