Peripheral Visions: Design in ephemeral New Zealand print c1880 – 1914
Authors:   , Cantlon Olwyn 
Published: November 2021

<p>My thesis is an investigation of design in print in New Zealand circa 1880 – 1914, the period in which it is generally accepted graphic design began in the industrial Western nations. The medium of design studied is New Zealand’s most significant printed product, popular everyday ephemera, which is contextualized within local and international print production, technology, and debates concerning design. The research aim is to contribute to new approaches in the proto-discipline of graphic design history, specifically the current debates concerning purpose, scope and methods, by writing a local study that has relevance here and internationally. In this way it joins the growing number of local and national design studies of countries customarily defined as politically, culturally and geographically peripheral. It further explores alternative approaches by using formal analysis as a tool for the interpretation of visual codes and their rhetoric in print to enable the appraisal of local significances and international relationships. The study follows a model of graphic design as visual communication encompassing purpose, production, and reception, to argue the historic significations, activities, and values of local graphic design are of critical import for their role in social and cultural formation at both national and international levels. It argues against traditional binary models of centre to margin design transmission to assert alternative theories of networks, and of the hybridity of forms (particularly in colonial societies). Theories that, like this study, seek to apprehend complexity and more appropriately explain research findings that indicate the spread of design in print is an active circulation of signifying forms in a process of influence, adaptation and exchange. The argument engages five theoretical debates that are further concerned with contemporary issues of history and its methods as they impinge on graphic design history. They are the current issues of historiography and calls for interdisciplinarity; the status and importance of ephemeral print; relationships of graphic design to modernity; concepts of the peripheral and networks; the use of semiotics in interpreting the visual rhetoric of typography and image. This investigation, allowing for problems with the survival and attribution of material, is formed by three case studies that encompass a range of processes, media and products. The first considers typography and letterpress through the linked printing and writings of compositor/printer Robert Coupland Harding; the second charts the career of lithographic designer and illustrator Robert Hawcridge and his use of visual syntax, rhetoric and iconography. The third considers the composite local illustrated magazine the New Zealand Graphic and the role of design in editorial and advertising matter. New knowledge is diverse, establishing crucial facts about design here, its forms, and the importance it was accorded in supposedly slight material. Widespread and unexpected influences and networks of exchange are traced, and the considerable but neglected role of graphic design in social and cultural formation and the early articulations of a national identity are appraised. While of significance for the development of graphic design history, the findings also have relevance for the wider investigations of new history, including transnational, cosmopolitan, technological, and material histories.</p>