Design and Visual Communication

Design and Visual Communication—the first-ever English translation of Bruno Munari’s extraordinary Design e Comunicazione Visiva (1968)—remains an important guide to bridging design education and everyday life. Published after Munari served as visiting professor at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Design and Visual Communication takes over fifty lessons, class materials, and even letters home in which he describes life in America, and transforms them into a book about the future of art, architecture, and design. Conceived as a living volume, the book was written as inspiration to current and future designers to push beyond the past, however recent, and develop new tools to see and understand tomorrow’s world.

The facsimile reprint is accompanied by new contextual annotations by Munari scholar and design historian Jeffrey Schnapp. These micro-interventions highlight the innovations that make this work as relevant today as when originally published.