Ellen attempts to revalue—in a positive rather than a destructive way—some of the fundamental theory of modern graphic design and make it accessible to all. Philosopher Walter Benjamin called writers to take up the camera; the intention behind Ellen's own study of design history and theory is to eventually influence designers to take up writing. Benjamin’s “author-as-producer” would have been able to juxtapose image and text; the skills of a graphic designer/writer would allow her not only to juxtapose but also to penetrate: to analyse images with the “language” of both words and graphics, and to determine the format in which a message might be framed. Despite the hostility expressed towards writing in these brilliant and influential textbooks of design, the notational “vocabulary” of form that develops out of them is rich in associative, culturally communicative meaning. The visual “language” of the diagram, as demonstrated by the some of the examples of graphic design published in Kepes’s text, is not a transparent filter for self-evident meaning, but rather a transforming, metaphoric code.
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