This catalogue accompanies the exhibition “Graphic Design: Now in Production” and surveys the vibrant landscape of graphic designers who have seized the means of production and are rewriting the nature of contemporary design practice. Charting a rich vein of activity that cuts across wildly diverse fields, “Graphic Design: Now in Production” chronicles the postmillennial scene of all-access design tools and self-publishing systems, the open-source nature of creative production, and the entrepreneurial spirit of the designer turned producer.

The basic problem was how to create a companion publication for the exhibition “Graphic Design: Now in Production.” At the Walker we conceptualize our publications as parallel endeavors to the actual exhibitions, utilizing the aspects of the book medium and the editorial process, to achieve things that a gallery presentation can’t, both documenting the actual show as well as expanding upon the ideas within it.

Inspired by our museum founder’s own salon-style hangings in his nineteenth-century mansion and our painting storage facility, the layout style allows for a dense presentation of material and unexpected juxtapositions. Small texts that we call bits are incorporated throughout the catalogue and represent a combination of original writing, aggregated authorship, and excerpted quotations. In this way, the design weaves together the voices of curators, “crowds,” and artists with images of works found in the show and beyond, including the supplemental and the tangential. This premodern style of arrangement, which attempts to impose an order and sensibility on an often incoherent assemblage of objects, speaks to our contemporary condition of information overload in an increasingly fragmented search-based culture. The Whole Earth Catalog was also a key reference point, both in terms of layout as well as the general intention of the book to provide “access to tools.” As part of the content generation phase we created a wiki, editable by Walker Art Center and Cooper-Hewitt staff as well as the guest curators, to collect all these bits of knowledge. The layout of this book was a unique process for us, in that every page was inevitably designed 2 or 3 times. We would take a first pass at the general layout, then assess the specific content, add in new texts and images, assess again, and redesign the page again. To say the generation of the book was “organic” is an understatement.

The editorial conception and the design conception happened simultaneously, feeding back on each other. Being our own clients, we set the bar very high for what this book should be, and we decided to be incredibly ambitious with the content generation and the design layout, basically melding the two. Part operating manual, part academic reader, and part sourcebook, the catalogue freely mixes writing styles, from personal rants to the collective speak of Wikipedia, touching upon hundreds of topics. Picking up where the design authorship debates of the 1990s left off, this catalogue examines the evolution of graphic design in an expanded field of practice. It considers myriad issues, such as the changing nature of reading and writing, self-publishing and clientless design, the persistence of the poster and the book in a screen-based culture, the designer’s voice in the age of crowdsourcing, the visualization of journalism, the ubiquity of branding, and the democratization of design tools and software. Embedded throughout are numerous bits—factoids, explanations, and tangents—exploring everything from fake Apple Stores to Adobe DPS, Ghanaian coffins to cultural analytics, Scriptographer to heraldry.

The book is a paperback wrapped with a thin, coated, four color dustjacket. We were looking for a very floppy book, something that falls open quite easily and is very easy to read. In order to achieve that we asked our paper mill, French Paper, to cut the paper on the opposite grain direction than what they normally do, to make sure that the grain fell in line with the binding of the book. Åbäke’s parasite publication is the only signature in the book that is cut in the typical grain direction, which is quite noticeable when you flip through the book. Åbäke’s artist contribution, “I Am Still Alive #21″ is an ongoing “magazine” that only exists within other magazines and books, relying on publishers donating pages for Åbäke to use.

The colophon page is also highly illustrated, including an image of a college design class (taught in conjunction with the exhibition by Walker design staff) press-checking the second to last signature. Once the photograph was taken, we took the image back to the prepress department, showed the class how it gets color-corrected, cropped, ripped and burned to plates, how the plates are output, and then how the plates are put into the press.

We definitely think of this book as a textbook, and we are hopeful that it will make its way into the hands of design students around the world. In a field that is constantly fracturing and redefining itself, if self-definition is even possible, this book presents a small snapshot of one direction that graphic design is exploring.