Life in Design

W. A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design offers an engaging and inspiringoverview of the designer's wide-ranging creative output and lastingimpact on the graphic arts. Bruce Kennett's careful research, warmprose, and inclusion of numerous personal accounts from Dwiggins'sfriends and contemporaries portray not only a brilliant designer, but atruly likable character. Often credited with inventing the term "graphic design," W. A. Dwiggins was a quintessential maker - fabricating hisown tools, inventing techniques, and experimenting with design in areasas wide-ranging as modular ornament, stamps, currency, books, kites,marionettes, and theatrical sets and lighting. More than any of hiscontemporaries, he united the full range of applied arts into a singleprofession - designer. Despite this, a thorough study of Dwiggins hadnever been published until this book was released in 2018.

"To call W. A. Dwiggins a consummate American type designer, calligrapher, book designer, and illustrator is just to get started. Gifted with a superb literary sensibility and a flair for the dramatic, he wrote plays, stories, and crafted marionettes in a theater of his own devising [...]. Bruce Kennett has brought Dwiggins to life in this impeccably written and designed biography."  -- Carl Rollyson, biographer of Susan Sontag, Thurgood Marshall, and Rebecca West, among others

"A book to spend a year with. This book is many things, but most of all it is proof positive that if there is any doubt about the origin theory of graphic design, Dwiggins did more to promote, diversify, and integrate the graphic, typographic, and printing-arts disciplines than anyone of his generation." -- Steven Heller, author, art director, and design historian 

I just got the Dwiggins book. It is really the best design book I've ever seen. The balance of text and art is perfect. And as an old layout artist, I appreciate how Bruce Kennett has respected the margins while playing with the scale. Great pacing.The quality of reproduction, and its understated use of color correction adds to the book's authenticity. Bruce made me understand the extent of WAD's genius. I was always impressed, but I had no idea. -- Roger Black, publication designer, founder of Font Bureau