Ellen Lupton : Deconstruction & Graphic Design

The term deconstruction originally surfaced around the 1980s and has since been used to label practices in graphic design fashion and architecture etc. Jacques Derrida initiated the theory of deconstruction as a mode of question through and about technologies, formal devices, social institutions and central metaphors of representation. Deconstruction is both a part of history and a theory embedded in both visual and academic culture. 

Deconstruction, like critical strategies based on Marxism, feminism, semiotics and anthropology, focuses not on the themes and imagery of its objects but rather on linguistics and institutional systems that frame their production. In Derrida's theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. Deconstruction also attacks oppositions by showing how devalued negative concept inhabits the valued positive one. For example opposition of nature and culture and how one can be dependant on the other to be understood.  Derrida also asserted an intellectual system built on opposition between opposition and representation. For example deconstruction looks at writing as an active form of representation using the term grammatology to name the study of writing as a representation. The text describes "If writing is but a copy of spoken language , typography is a mode of representation even farther removed from the primal source of meaning in the mind of the author."

The alphabet represents sounds of speech by reducing them to a finite set of repeatable marks. Typography is one media through which repetition occurs. Typographic production involves composing letters into lines of text. Typography can include the design of letterforms and the arrangement of letters into lines of text. Typographic features can include the choice of typeface, kerning, line, columns and patterns formed by graphic distinctions across a body of text. 

Existing work such as French Currents of the Letter" designed at Cranbrook Academy of Art is influential even today. In this piece the conventional relationship between inside and outside figure and ground, is inverted as the spaces between the lines and words progressively expand and the footnotes move into the area normally reserved for central text. This design piece breaks the basic conventions of a book. 

Cultural forms helped fabricate categories such as race and sexuality which had huge relevance to visual artists in the 1970s and 80s. Post-structuralism provided a critical gateway to "post-modernism" posing an alternative to more traditional approaches. Whereas Post-structuralism has an emphasis on openness and much more theory towards self-expression. As interpretations are private and personal generated by unique sensibilities of the designers. The post structural response asserts the interior self constructed by external systems and technologies. Whilst it is likely some aspect of design will follow strict rules such as a grid system, invention and revolution can result in tactical aggressions against the grid. 

A range of visual features originally used in Architecture began being used in Graphic Design like icons and colours from neo-classical post-modernism. A more critical approach to deconstruction reached graphic designers through fields like photography. Deconstruction then become design world cliches where existing tendencies were catalysed by new ones. In the mid 90's the term "deconstruction" is used casually to label any work that favours complexity over simplicity and dramatises the formal possibilities of digital production. To summarise "we see deconstruction as a critical process an act of questioning."