The Designer As: Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator & Collaborator

The role of designers in communication and visual culture is evolving, from designers serving as commercial hired guns to assuming the more empowering roles of design authorship. It has become standard practice in design education to teach designers to develop their own voice and create self-initiated projects. The role of the designer can expand to being the author, producer, curator, network facilitator, activist, consultant, entrepreneur... the list goes on and on.In this book, Steven McCarthy, a professor of graphic design at the University of Minnesota in the USA and expert on the subject, provides an overview of the phenomenon of design authorship and interviews many international designers who have taken on different roles as authors or producers of their own projects. The Designer as... is written to give design practitioners a consolidated overview of text and images that have been important in the development of design authorship. Graphic design students will benefit from learning about the theoretical underpinnings of the methods, ideas and media shaping current practice and providing a trajectory towards future practice.