Graphic Design in the Dark Age

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Edited and compiled by Harsh Patel

Graphic design in the 21st-century West is inextricably bound to failing political systems. Its forms and styles are increasingly the result of privately owned algorithmic generation and exchange. Most designers work as facilitative centrists or mercenary intelligentsia, operating within the visual rubrics of commercialism and activism. Is this the same discipline that, a century earlier, envisioned a global, socialist “design for life”? How could its practitioners and institutes consider professional experiences outside of a corrupted internet? How does graphic design’s cultural dialogue abandon performativity and pretension to reclaim pointed yet porous discourse? How do schools counter formal and critical homogeneity in their enrollment strategies? How do all designers navigate tokenistic acceptance and a deluge of the Oriental gaze? How will the future of the discipline be shaped by those who reject the technological structures that largely control its output? In a digital playground of styles, can graphic design feel truly progressive again?

Harsh Patel, 2025
Softcover, 60 pages
8 x 6 inches
Edition of 100

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