As early as 1959, Herb Lubalin credited television with forcing attention on the relationship between word and image in print advertising. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan predicted the rise of a progressively visual culture and the collapse of the "Gutenberg Galaxy." McLuhan's invocation of television as the democratic spirit of the age echoed the technological optimism of the 1920s Constructivist avant-garde. Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky were entranced by mechanically mediated pictures--photographic, lithographic, and telegraphic--as the basis of a universal language. Remarks on the rapid replacement of words with images are common among intellectuals today. Critic Joseph Giovannini mourned the lost literary integrity of magazines in 1989, blaming "competition from television, the VCR, and other nonprint media" for spawning "agressively designed pages that freely mix and cut words, photographs, and graphic devices."

Despite the rising tide of images in contemporary culture, however, words continue to proliferate. Even television, the medium so commonly reviled as literacy's executioner, has become increasingly saturated with typography. Pictures have not, in fact, replaced text in contemporary media; instead, words have become more physical, more embodied, more pictorial. Sophisticated illustration was a hallmark of magazines in the 1970s, exemplified by the influential format created for New York Magazine by Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser in 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, editorial designers have been fascinated with typography, using marginalia, pullout quotes, information graphics, and other devices to interrupt the unity of the classical linear text.

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© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum