For those of us designing today, there is significant value in studying, collecting and curating Graphic Design’s past. As we generate a professional archaeology, we help to define the industry, and we build a resource that enables us to learn from the aesthetics and approaches that predate our own practice. This historical record also starts to provide evidence for the importance of our work.

In 1922 Book and Type Designer W.A. Dwiggins wrote an article suggesting a new title for the emerging profession of Graphic Design. He advocated for our craft, insisting the print compositors and commercial artists of the day were adding value to the content they were working with. Dwiggins sought to elevate our profession, our process and our outcomes so that people outside our industry might better understand and respect what we do.

95 years on, our profession has evolved, as have the audience, mediums and channels we design for. Today, there is a growing appreciation for Graphic Design, and it is more widely understood how we inform, influence and interpret the world around us. Recognising the active role we play in society, and our professions historical and cultural relevance, a number of institutions have started to collect critical examples of Graphic Design.

Just as our work is for an audience; our visual history speaks of that audience. Our work both reflects the human condition and records social developments as they happen. While often attributed as a ‘lowbrow’ visual discipline (by the arts elitists!), Graphic Design deals with the realities of every day life at a particular point in time.

MOMA’s Juliet KinChin writes “Graphic design has been vital part of MoMA’s collection, exhibitions and identity from the outset in the 1930s, with two early monographic exhibitions being devoted to graphic designers Cassandre (1936) and Edward McKnight Kauffer (1937), and “Bauhaus 1919-1928” (1938), an installation designed by none other than Herbert Bayer of the Bauhaus.” In 2011 MoMA began to acquire typefaces, 2012 video games and in 2014 they started to add apps to the collection.

The digital media landscape presents a lot of challenges to institutions wishing to collect Graphic Design that isn't tactile or as tangible as a paper-based artefact. While archivists 'wrestle' with preserving digital materials in robust formats, the Design fields are pioneering methods for the collection of technologies. The MoMA collection now includes 8,000 examples of Graphic Design. “Mostly posters, but also including printed ephemera, letterheads, magazine covers, letter fonts (digital and metal type), signage, album record covers, film title sequences, apps, packaging, video games and interaction design.”

NFT's present a very new opportunity for collecting and displaying digital media. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are electronic identifiers that verify the existence and the ownership of a digital collectible. The technology has been around since at least 2017, and come as an offshoot of the boom in cryptocurrencies, which also run on the blockchain. “We are disrupting the art museum industry by transforming old paintings and artwork into NFTs,” wrote Global Art Museum on Twitter. “The NFT space is new and nebulous, but we aim to bring the museums into this space. The days of boring, staid, and stuffy museums are over.”

Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist who goes by the name Beeple, set the auction record for the medium last month with Christie's selling a digital collage of his "everyday" series for $69 million.

While the internet and digitisation of collections creates the ability for designers to discover and engage with more design exemplar than ever before, many of these institutions are also offering more immersive, opportunities to experience examples. Many believe it does not belong in gallery spaces or under glass and exhibiting Graphic Design does present contextual challenges but because these artefacts have made such critical contributions to culture Jonathan Barnbrook’s iconic record sleeves or London Underground poster can and should sit with authority in exhibition spaces.

Tom Wilson, head of collections at Design Museum acknowledges, Graphic design exhibitions attract specialist audiences and as such sometimes get less ‘air time’ than other disciplines. “For a non-specialist visitor, it can be difficult to separate the design of a poster from its message” and that

An understanding of our past helps us to define our own territory today. I remember the first time I saw Jan Tschichold’s work, I was sitting in the Auckland public Library, and I could feel my heart swell and head explode. Viewing Oz Cooper’s use of grid’s and page proportion in ‘Chicago Designers book of 1937’ gave me a new appreciation of information hierarchy. Beatrice Warde’s ‘Printing Should be Invisible’ has greatly informed my position on a designers influence. And Rick Poyner’s ‘No more rules’ helped me to make sense of the graphic landscape and model’s for contemporary practice. I could list and credit many more significant influences but the point is each piece of work I have done since has been a dialogue with those designers who preceded me.

Today’s cutting edge may well be tomorrow’s mainstream. As an industry, our work is both linear and cyclic, each ‘new’ trend or technology that emerges in Graphic Design is often a direct reaction or repetition of a previous one. Early and important examples from our past help to shape and define contemporary practice while adding credibility, value and meaning to our future. Collections, exhibitions and digital repositories documenting our history and increasing our visibility are vital to helping us grow and to innovate both as individual designer’s and as an industry.