“Vernaculars of Capitalism”: Problems of Periodization in Graphic Design History

Carol Willis develops the concept of “vernaculars of capitalism” in Form Follows Finance, her 1995 study of early skyscrapers in Chicago and New York City. Eschewing a traditional focus on the divergent philosophies of the two cities’ architectural “schools,” Willis instead foregrounds the growth-oriented imperatives of capitalist land use and the reactive constraints of local zoning law. Such impersonal forces, she argues, contribute as much to the finished form of a given building as its designer ultimately does.

In this paper, I rework Willis’s concept as an interpretive tool for graphic design history. Whereas Willis focuses on formal distinctions between two contemporaneous localities, I attend to the graphic forms that accompanied three distinct regimes of capitalist accumulation: the liberal, Fordist, and post-Fordist or neoliberal epochs. I draw out the contrasts between these epochs’ dominant vernaculars by focusing on periods of transition. I ground the conflict between the craft knowledge of printers and the rationalist goals of early graphic designers in the shift from liberal to Fordist capitalism, and I reinterpret the clash between modernist and postmodernist understandings of professional practice in the context of the Fordist paradigm’s decline after the mid-1970s.

While this paper attends to the intentions and interpretations of graphic designers, it also brings to bear a structural and historical perspective that proved elusive for practitioners bound up in the economic necessity of their time. I conclude by arguing that long-standing debates in graphic design historiography might be reoriented by lending increased attention to the history of capitalism.