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 (musician), Nigel Coates (architect), Vaughan Oliver (graphic designer), and Herbert Spencer (graphic designer). 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". In 2020, Yale University Press published his book about the work of graphic designer David King.