Whether the road is smooth or rough, it’s best to keep your seat belt fastened and your eyes on the road ahead: examining the designerly evolution of Dialectic, the academic journal of the AIGA Design Educators’ Community

From the late summer of 2014 until the early fall of 2019, the AIGA sponsored the publication of a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal titled “Dialectic.” I was its founding producer, co-managing editor, and design director. Its raison d’etre was to provide a rigorously vetted forum for design educators, researchers, scholars and critics to publish work that satisfied our editorial and design parameters within one of seven, well-established classifications, such as “Research Papers” and “Theoretical Speculations,” and a category that was more unique to visual design, “visual narratives.” (Submissions into this category allowed designers-cum-authors a visually dominant means to address a given social, public policy, technological, or economic topic.) The diverse array of content that constituted each of Dialectic’s issues informed and guided an uncomplicated and uncluttered structural design approach that began with the design of our website and was then adapted to the design of our printed version by our graphic designer, Laura Rossi Garcia. As the process of “working back-and-forth” between the design of Dialectic’s online presence and its print version progressed, over-arching ideas about “designing for today’s technology” and “designing from the experiential viewpoint of the [socio-culturally astute, visually literate] reader”—touted originally by the likes of Tschichold, and more recently by authors such as Cooper, Goodwin and Garrett—gained the most traction. In this manner, Dialectic’s formal appearance evolved to facilitate the reading and effective navigation of its unique-and-broad array of scholarly material that was visually enhanced rather than hobbled by typographic and image-based details.