Deliberate Designs

As a new year begins, we celebrate by displaying a January calendar page, among other creations, that was designed by the man who coined the term 'graphic designer' in 1922. William A. Dwiggins was an illustrator, calligrapher, and type and book designer who produced most of his influential works during the first half of the 20th century.

Dwiggins had a monumental impact on book design improvements during the 1920s and 1930s and created numerous fonts such as Caledonia which are still in use today. Dwiggins's criticism of the low standard of book design in the 1910s led to a collaboration with the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house in later decades. Like Knopf, Dwiggins was committed to high-quality book design and publication and brought his aesthetic to both his commercial advertising commissions as well as his own personal projects.

We have a small collection of Dwiggins-related materials here at Rauner thanks to the papers of Dartmouth professor Ray Nash, a graphic-arts historian who ran the Graphic Arts Workshop at Dartmouth from 1937 until 1970. Along with many other fascinating example of printing, Nash left us four scrapbooks containing work related to Dwiggins. To see them, come to Rauner and ask for the Ray Nash papers (MS-1076), boxes 52 and 53.