Rick Poynor


Rick Poynor is a British writer on design, graphic design, typography, and visual culture.

Career

He began as a general visual arts journalist, working on Blueprint magazine in London. After founding Eye magazine, which he edited from 1990 to 1997, he focused increasingly on visual communication. He is writer-at-large and columnist of Eye, and a contributing editor and columnist of 'Print magazine.
In 1999, Poynor was a co-ordinator of the First Things First 2000 manifesto initiated by Adbusters. In 2003, he co-founded Design Observer, a weblog for design writing and discussion, with William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, and Michael Bierut. He wrote for the site until 2005. He was a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London from 1994 to 1999 and returned to the RCA in 2006 as a research fellow. He also taught at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. In 2004, Poynor curated the exhibition, ', at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The exhibition subsequently travelled to four venues in China and to Zurich.
Poynor's writing encompasses both cultural criticism and design history, and his books break down into three categories. He wrote several monographs about significant British figures in the arts and design: Brian Eno, Nigel Coates, Vaughan Oliver, and Herbert Spencer. Other books document and analyse general movements in graphic design and typography. Among these are Typography Now, the first international survey of the digital typography of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and No More Rules, a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism. Poynor also published three essay collections, Design Without Boundaries, Obey the Giant, and Designing Pornotopia, which explore the cultural implications of visual communication, including advertising, photography, branding, graphic design, and retail design.
Poynor was a prominent interviewee in the 2007 documentary film Helvetica''.

Published work

As author:
As contributor:
As editor of Monographics series: