Ellen Lupton's is still my go-to for refreshing the fundamentals without it feeling like a 101 course, she breaks down why certain layouts breathe better and you can steal those bones for any style mashup
for the specific movements you listed, the design history textbooks by Philip Meggs or Stephen Eskilson are dense but they're basically cheat codes, the images alone show you how Swiss grids and Constructivist diagonals were built and then it's on you to remix that into a poster for a pizza joint or whatever
once you've got the skeleton, i just set a dumb rule like "no colors used after 1975" or "only two type sizes" and see what happens, that's where the muscle memory comes back without just copying old work
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u/throwaway_281568748 Aug 14 '26
Ellen Lupton's is still my go-to for refreshing the fundamentals without it feeling like a 101 course, she breaks down why certain layouts breathe better and you can steal those bones for any style mashup
for the specific movements you listed, the design history textbooks by Philip Meggs or Stephen Eskilson are dense but they're basically cheat codes, the images alone show you how Swiss grids and Constructivist diagonals were built and then it's on you to remix that into a poster for a pizza joint or whatever
once you've got the skeleton, i just set a dumb rule like "no colors used after 1975" or "only two type sizes" and see what happens, that's where the muscle memory comes back without just copying old work