This book served as the catalogue for the exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. The exhibition was organized around questions of form, function, and medium and focused on designers beginning their careers in the 1980s and 1990s. The first section dealt with messages on the street, graphic design competing for public attention. Next, typography was analyzed, the art of creating letters for reproduction and organizing them in space. The third section of the book considered the chief social function of design: to visualize the identity of institutions and audiences. The last chapter looked at publishing including books, magazines and computers. Selected interviews with noted graphic designers appear in the final section of the book. Pages of the following items, which are held by the Sackner Archive, "Through Light and the Alphabet" by Johanna Drucker, the 1989 Time Warner Annual Report, and the Independent Project Press are reproduced. In addition, Longhauser's poster, held by the Sackner Archive, The Language of Michael Graves, is depicted. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.