Louise Fili opened up the conventions of cover design when she served as art director for Pantheon Books during the 1980s.

As art director of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, since 1987, Carol Devine Carson has led a team of young designers who have played with elements of the weird, the ugly, and the perverse.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Massimo Vignelli helped rethink the book as a total object by unifying the inside and the outside, the facade and the interior, with an architectural sense of structure.

Perhaps the most conservative field of book design is academic publishing.

Shifts in the literary form of academic writing have encouraged design innovation at the University of Nebraska Press, which has published texts by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, inventor of the term "deconstruction."

The transformation of post-structuralism from academic theory into cultural practice is embodied in the publications of Zone Books, founded in 1985 by Jonathan Crary, Hal Foster, Sanford Kwinter, and Michele Feher.

Following Zone's lead, The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, in Santa Monica, became a patron of innovative design in the early 1990s, when editor Julia Bloomfield commissioned book designs from Mau and other designers, including Lorraine Wild and Laurie Haycock Makela.

In a period when artists have challenged the neutrality of reproduction and display, exhibition catalogs have become more than just elegant portfolios of essays and pictures.

Over the past decade, digital technologies have radically altered the way books are produced, placing sensitive typographic tools in the hands of authors, editors, and designers.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum