This week’s installment of good reads is one of my favorite collections of the ever thoughtful Steven Heller, POP: How Graphic Design Shapes Popular Culture
The book is a collection of excellent essays detailing the cyclical relationship that graphic design has played in influencing popular culture and in turn being influenced by popular culture and then influencing… and so on and so on. This line from the introduction beautifully sums up the book and why it is important:
Pop culture is often maligned as fleeting. But history shows that sometimes what is pop in one culture has time-honored resonance in later ones… this book is a n attempt to show that pop culture, especially as seen through the lens of design, illustration, and satiric and political art (and other things), is integral to a broader understanding of who we are and where we are going. Oh yeah, and it is key to being literate in the twenty-first century. – Steven Heller
