The Design Reviewed Collection
Design Reviewed is an independent graphic design archive based in Bradford, West Yorkshire.
The physical collection contains more than 11,000 artefacts spanning 150 years of graphic design history, including magazines, books, posters, exhibition catalogues, programmes, advertising, ephemera and other printed matter.
Built over more than a decade, the collection brings together familiar landmarks of graphic design history with publications and designers that have received considerably less attention.
Thousands of these objects have been documented through the Design Reviewed online archive, where they can be explored through designers, countries, decades, movements, formats and individual publications.
11,000
150 years
25+
One physical collection
What the Collection Contains
Magazines & Journals
Periodicals form one of the largest parts of Design Reviewed.
The collection includes international graphic design, typography, architecture, advertising and visual-culture journals, allowing individual objects to be viewed as part of longer histories of publishing and design.
Holdings include IDEA, Gebrauchsgraphik, Graphis, Typografia, Typographische Monatsblätter, Drukkersweekblad, Design, Architectural Design, Westvaco Inspirations and many others.
Some titles are represented by individual issues; others by substantial or near-complete runs.
Books
The archive contains books documenting typography, advertising, identity, architecture, photography, illustration and visual communication alongside books that are themselves significant examples of graphic design.
They range from early twentieth-century publications to contemporary design books and monographs.
Posters
The poster collection brings together work created for cultural institutions, exhibitions, theatre, public information, commerce and other contexts.
It includes examples by internationally recognised designers alongside work by designers whose careers remain comparatively under-documented.
Catalogues & Programmes
Exhibition catalogues, museum publications, theatre programmes and institutional printed matter provide another important strand of the collection.
These objects help document relationships between designers and the organisations for which they worked, particularly museums, galleries and cultural institutions.
Ephemera
Not every important piece of graphic design was intended to survive.
Tickets, invitations, advertisements, leaflets, maps, brochures, labels and other ephemeral material provide evidence of visual culture beyond books, posters and established design publications.
Preserving these everyday objects is an important part of the archive.
Collection Strengths
Postwar European Modernism
The collection contains extensive material relating to postwar European graphic design, particularly the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Designers represented include Wim Crouwel, Willem Sandberg, Jan van Toorn, Karl Oskar Blase, Jan Bons and many others.
Japanese Graphic Design
Design Reviewed holds an expanding collection of twentieth-century Japanese graphic design, including magazines, books, advertising, posters, tickets and ephemera.
The archive documents work by designers including Yusaku Kamekura, Ikko Tanaka, Kazumasa Nagai, Kohei Sugiura, Kiyoshi Awazu and Takenobu Igarashi alongside wider histories of Japanese visual culture.
International Design Publishing
Design journals provide a way of understanding not simply individual designers but how ideas travelled internationally.
Long-running publications within the archive reveal changing approaches to typography, advertising, photography, illustration and visual communication across decades.
British Graphic Design
British material includes substantial collections of postwar magazines, institutional graphics, posters and cultural publications, including material connected with designers such as Ken Garland and Ken Briggs.
Under-documented Histories
Design Reviewed is interested not only in established figures.
A significant purpose of the archive is identifying designers whose work has been overlooked, correcting missing credits and making material that is difficult to find elsewhere accessible for further research.
A Physical and Digital Archive
Design Reviewed begins with physical objects.
Original material is collected, researched and documented before selected artefacts are made accessible through the online archive.
Digitisation makes it possible to connect an individual object to its designer, publisher, country, date, movement and related material elsewhere in the collection.
The aim is not to replace the physical object, but to make the information it contains useful to a much wider audience.
Explore the Archive
The online archive is free to explore.
Browse graphic design by designer, decade, country, movement, format and publication, or discover individual objects from the collection.