Aggie Toppins
Associate Professor
Washington University in St. Louis
Thinking Through Graphic Design History sketches the terrain where historical thinking and graphic design practice meet. Written for college students, design educators, and designers, this 336-page survey combines theoretical exploration with practical application. The author interrogates traditional approaches to graphic design history and explains how historical research methods help designers shape socially engaged, critical practices.
The book makes a contribution to graphic design and design history by bridging scholarship and practice. It advocates for a “social turn” with insights and case studies from all over the world. Consider, for instance, how a typeface can carry forward stories of past political struggles; how AR and VR animate static objects in a museum; how letterpress printing addresses the “unfinished business” of the past; and how designers make and use archives.
In the introduction, the author provides a brief historiography to situate graphic design history within an art historical literature which has long championed individuals and their aesthetics. This orientation, while relevant forty years ago, is limiting in today’s changing field. Traditional graphic design history instills connoisseurship and attempts to elevate the field’s cultural cachet to be on par with art and architecture, but it does not adequately help students grapple with issues of power and agency. Using lenses informed by intersectional feminism, materialism, and post-structuralism, the author advocates for social and cultural orientations to graphic design history. These approaches illuminate change over time, contingency, and complexity in matters of everyday life, including labor, resistance, and the use of design by audiences. Throughout its 14 chapters, the book shows how history and theory come to life in global projects that respond to present-day and future-sighted issues.
The author’s research methods include a literature review, archival research, interviews with dozens of designers and historians, and testing exercises with students in the classroom. The content is informed by the author’s working-class background, her perspective as a designer, educator, and scholar, as well as the insights of more than 60 contributors whose work is shown or cited. The accomplished British historian Grace Lees-Maffei endorsed the book, writing, “Toppins encourages designers to deepen and strengthen their design practice through engaging with history in a variety of ways. This book is an essential part of the graphic designer’s toolkit.”
Published by Bloomsbury in February 2025, Thinking Through Graphic Design History is already making an impact in the classroom. Educators from Leeds to Louisiana have added it to their syllabi, and the book has been collected by more than 50 institutions worldwide. Toppins has been invited to discuss the book with audiences of peers across the US and Europe, including the School of Visual Arts’ D-Crit program, the Design Principles & Practices conference in Singapore, and Svenska Tecknare in Sweden. The author, who also designed the book, was recognized by the University & College Designers Association (UCDA) with a Silver Award. Toppins has also appeared on the Underscore podcast and, as a former guest on Scratching the Surface, was interviewed by Jarret Fuller for the podcast’s substack.
This book was made possible with funding support from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Office of the Provost at Washington University in St. Louis.
Toppins_OutcomesBiography
Aggie Toppins is a designer, collagist, and researcher who explores where graphics come from, what they do, and how they change over time. She is the author of Thinking Through Graphic Design History, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Aggie’s creative work has been internationally exhibited and garnered national design awards including the Type Director’s Club “Certificate of Typographic Excellence,” STA100, and the SECAC Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design award. She has contributed to several books and has written for leading design journals including Design and Culture, Design Issues, Diseña, Eye, and AIGA Eye on Design. An award-winning educator, Toppins teaches at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned a Bachelor of Science in graphic design from the University of Cincinnati in 2003 and a Master of Fine Arts in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012.
This project was the 2025 Design Incubation Educators Awards winning recipient in the category of Scholarship: Research Publication.