Design Against Design is a new book from Montreal-based multidisciplinary design and communications studio LOKI that critically questions what designing politically might mean today.

The book is organised into four interconnected thematic sections, starting with Critique which presents a political economic analysis of graphic design in relation to neoliberal capitalism and considers practical ways to resist it. Through semiotic case studies of hipster nostalgia and Pantone’s appropriation of subcultures, this chapter asks us to take visual culture seriously, to take the trends we create seriously, and consider their real world impacts.

Practice looks critically at how designers work towards (and sometimes against) social change within both a professional studio context and alongside social movements. Two interviews, one with Philippe and Nancy Vermès on the student protest posters of Atelier Populaire during May 1968 in Paris, the other with Sandy Kaltenborn, founder of the Berlin-based visual communication studio Image Shift, frame these types of design practice in an attempt to position them as complementary.

Materiality focuses on the craft of graphic design, on language and typography, legibility and illegibility, on the acts of speaking and making. It attempts to make evident that this book in your hands is a book, and argues for why that might matter. Conversations with the poet Kaie Kellough and our Montreal-based printers, Kata Soho, bookend the section as a metaphor for the design process, from poetic conception to material production.

Autonomy considers the emotional and relational aspects of graphic design, understanding that interdependence is intricately bound to any possibility for self-determination within and beyond the discipline. I speak to design student Sarah Auches, and our client Jenn Clamen of Stella, to deepen the understanding of these relationalities.