Design Humor: The Art of Graphic Wit (review)

The visual pun, writes Steven Heller, "is as endemic to conceptual graphic design as the metaphor is to creative writing." Noting that puns are just one of its forms, he guides his readers through a maze of the varieties of verbal and visual wit. Heller is art director of the New York Times Book Review and the author of more than 80 books on design and design-related issues. This volume, as he confesses in the preface, is an altered adaptation of his and Gail Anderson's earlier book, titled Graphic Wit: The Art of Humor in Design (1991). While the structure of the new version parallels that of its predecessor, the text itself has been enlarged in certain places and revised in others, in part to account for developments in graphic design in the past decade. It is regrettable that there are no color illustrations. Yet, even then, this is a valuable, interesting look at an essential ingredient of all forms of human communication.