Flip through the pages of The History of Graphic Design. Vol. 1: 1890-1959 and you’ll feel time not just pass, but press. Posters that once hawked chocolate in Art Nouveau flourishes. Corporate logos emerging from the stripped-down machine age. Magazine covers that gestured at modernity before modernity quite found its feet. In this sweeping tome, designer and historian Jens Müller doesn’t just chart aesthetics—he shows how our visual world was built, shaped, and re-shaped by culture, commerce, and technology.

Rather than haphazardly surveying “good design,” Müller arranges the work chronologically, decade by decade, so you can see the ripple effects. The 1890s’ decorative elegance slides into the geometries of the 1920s, which tumble into the industrial confidence of post-war adverts. Each spread is a visual timeline and a cultural mirror. Graphic design, we’re reminded, isn’t wallpaper—it’s shorthand for an era’s values, anxieties, and hopes.

What I found most compelling is how the book elevates design’s hidden players—the unsung sign-makers, magazine art directors, packaging designers—those whose names didn’t hit marquee lights but whose work shaped what we’ve come to expect of brand, image, and identity. The narrative doesn’t treat design as decoration but as foundational communication. A Helvetica “H”, a photomontage poster, an urban subway map—they all act like language. And in understanding them we begin to parse how modern visual culture speaks.

The companion volume Vol. 2: 1960–Today continues the story, as the analogue becomes digital, brands globalize, typography fragments, and design itself becomes a story we scroll through on screens rather than turn with our hands. Wikipedia Together, the volumes feel less like coffee-table showpieces and more like cultural atlases—beautiful, yes, but rigorous. They ask us: where did all this graphic noise come from, and what did it mean then versus now?

Visually, the books deliver. Each spread pairs powerful images with thoughtful captions, allowing the pictures to breathe without drowning in text. The oversized format gives grace to the details—the grain of print, the texture of paper, the boldness of colour in a steel-embossed world. It’s a reminder that while the content may be “just” design, the medium remains sensory.

For anyone who works in design, or simply consumes it every day (which is everyone), these books make you look twice. They invite you to question what you took for granted: Why is this logo shaped like this? Why did this poster look like that? Why does this visual language still echo in apps, ads, and interfaces today? They are a lens, sharp and curious, onto our visual lives.

In a culture where imagery is instantaneous and disposable, The History of Graphic Design pulls you aside and says, “Look a little slower. See the roots.” And when you do, you realise design is never just about pretty; it’s about meaning, memory, and making sense of the world.