Design and Visual Communication - Bruno Munari

Design and Visual Communication by Bruno Munari / 400-page paperback, 5.4 x 8.2 inches, published in 2025 by Inventory Press / ISBN 9781941753712

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A long-overdue English translation of Munari's seminal tract on the everyday value of architecture and design education

The first ever English translation of Bruno Munari's Design and Visual Communication (1968) fills a gap in Munari's output for the English-speaking world and provides a highly relevant guide to bridging architecture and design education and everyday life.

Published in 1968 after Munari was invited to the Carpenter Center at Harvard to teach, the book transforms over 50 lessons, class materials and letters addressed to the city of Milan, into a book on the future of art, architecture and design. Conceived as a living volume, the book is written to inspire current and future designers to push beyond past events, however recent, and develop new tools to see and understand tomorrow's world.

Accompanying the facsimile reproduction of the original volume are in-depth contextual annotations by Jeffrey Schnapp. As a Munari scholar and design historian, Schnapp has spent years unearthing the radical potential of critical historical material. His annotations and micro-interventions throughout the facsimile reprint seek to fulfill Munari's call for an evolution of the book in form and content and highlight how this work is as relevant today as when originally published.

Bruno Munari (1907–98) was an Italian artist, designer and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art and in nonvisual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning and creativity.

"In Design and Visual Communication, Munari writes of a design that is not a finished artifact or static in time, but that is a living process that puts us in dialogue with the world and with one another. This sounds like the kind of design we need more of now than ever. It would be playful but rigorous, intentional but fluid, experimental but intelligent, and, as always, unabashedly multidisciplinary." -Jarrett Fuller, Untapped