Volumes: design reviewed remixed revealed
Liner notes by Rudy VanderLans, co-founder of Emigre Inc.
Published by Set Margins’.
Available in the U.S. through Artbook/Distributed Art Press (3/25/2025)
Volume is an artifact of graphic design, a quantity, and a characteristic of music. Volumes explores the dynamics of volume in graphic design, from vernacular expressions to professional practice, featured in critical essays, reviews, speculations, polemics, incitements and fictions. This “remixed” edition of the original 2010 book discusses progressive political speech as “mother” of graphic design, design as entertainment, typography as spur and evasion of criticism, the branding of the Beatles’ Apple Records, the roles of class in design, design education, pornography, album cover art, independent record labels, anonymity and imaginary creative identities, design as cultural chaos-maker, and more.
Volumes features over 30 texts spanning over 25 years. In addition to five new works, original articles have been revised, with most featuring afterwords providing updates and reevaluations. Writings are grouped in four sections: “Field Recordings” offers critiques of education, practice and theory; “Amplifications” addresses the relationship of music and graphic design; “Teleidoscopin’” offers short fictions and narratives on art, design, and creativity; “Inference/Resonance” has longer-form speculations on art and design culture.
Volumes not only surveys graphic culture in context with the related fields of contemporary art and popular music, but equally serves as a record of one of design’s most controversial and influential times, and a primer on how to consider and write about its future.
“Wonderfully adventurous. With intense curiosity, Kenneth FitzGerald teases out meaning from every aspect of graphic design and its peers in art, architecture, music, and digital media.”
— Michèle Champagne, graphic artist
“Kenneth FitzGerald is a mutant and his book Volumes is a full display of his super powers.”
— Silas Munro, founder and partner, Polymode
- Softcover
- 130 mm x 209 mm / 5.12 x 8.23 inches
- 268 pages
- ISBN978-90-834498-1-4
- Release date: 12/21/2024
- Sewn and glued, perfect bound
- Inside black/white, cover 1 PMS
- Spot gloss varnish on cover, plus sticker
- Printer: Printon, Tallin (Estonia)
- Typefaces used: Mr. & Mrs. Eaves, Tangly designed by Zuzana Licko, VTC Tré Stencil Text, VTC Garibaldi Sans, VTC Harriet by Tré Seals
Book photography by Annette Behrens
Responses to the original edition:
“Graphic design embraces some great writers, but few display Kenneth’s combination of bite, wordplay, wit, and overall pop culture knowledge. Perhaps due to his position as an outsider, he never pulls any punches.…When we stopped publishing Emigre magazine, not receiving a steady diet of Kenneth’s writing was what I missed the most.” —Rudy VanderLans (from his “Liner Notes.”)
“A real treat, this, a whole book of essays by one of the most distinctive and, at times, idiosyncratic writers to bring his sights to bear on visual communication. FitzGerald’s ambitious pieces were a highlight during Emigre’s middle and later years; I always wished he would publish more widely. Volume shows what graphic design writing can do when it stops fretting so much about the narrowly professional issues that keep it earth-bound and obvious, and allows itself elbow room to improvise and riff.” —Rick Poynor
Kenneth FitzGerald’s Volume: Writing on Graphic Design, Music, Art and Culture is an important addition to the library of graphic design writing … FitzGerald is a fine writer with a gift for potent phrases … His prose is agile, unmannered, and always at the service of strong ideas born out of wide reading and deep engagement with contemporary culture, of both high and low varieties (look out for references to Thomas Pynchon and Garth Brooks). In other words, he’s highly readable. —Adrian Shaughnessy, Design Observer
“FitzGerald is still an incisive, fiercely clever writer. To former Emigre subscribers, reading this book recalls the excitement and debate that each new issue prompted when it entered classrooms and studios…And as yet, there are few voices echoing FitzGerald’s plainspoken, pragmatic approach to design writing. Where is today’s counterpart to Emigre? Who are today’s Kenneth FitzGeralds? These questions linger, and if anything, the publication of Volume makes them seem more pressing than ever.” — Elizabeth Guffey, Editor, Design and Culture
“Kenneth FitzGerald’s writing constitutes a truly original voice among the small group of proper design critics. His essays on design and culture are intelligent—possibly the reason he’s been so critical of our work.” —Stefan Sagmeister
“Kenneth FitzGerald’s writing is to design criticism as the harpoon was to Ahab; they are both deft weapons of existential inquiry.” —Elliott Earls
“If, like me, you miss the writings of Kenneth FitzGerald you can get the best and some new ones in this lovely compilation, Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture.” —Armin Vit, Quipsologies
“Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture, is excellent. I found it in the mail when I got home at midnight and by 2am I’d already dog-eared several pages and the margins were full of notes. If you are at all into reading serious commentary on design, Kenneth’s work is engaging, enjoyable and enlightening.” —Marc English, Design Shaman
“Volume, the new collection of writings by Kenneth FitzGerald, is an entertaining, erudite and accessible account of the the US design critic’s abiding interest in the relationship between graphic design, music and art.” —Paul Gorman, author of Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles
“Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art & Culture is an outstanding selection focusing on volume – sound, collections, and space – in the arts. It provides both new and classic writings by educator Kenneth FitzGerald that survey graphic design’s connections with other art mediums, offering a range of topics on everything from independent record labels to creating and marketing artistic identities, modern music’s influence and relationship to fine arts and graphics, and more. A pick for any arts or graphic arts collection!”—Midwest Book Review
