Abstract

Beneath the product announcements and splashy demos, technology continues to have a seismic effect on the practice of graphic design. Such tectonic shifts grind away continuously beneath day-to-day design practice and education, transforming the field’s landscape while creating adjacencies with formerly distant domains. This paper explores one such shift, arguing that the adoption of code as a creative tool has brought graphic design into a potentially transformative—yet familiar—relationship with the field of electronic literature. The paper identifies and discusses several key areas of overlap in the critical interests and practice of those two domains which have not previously been explicitly discussed, including: the common media and tools shared by both, the literary aspects of graphic design, and a shared technological history. The paper then proposes specific opportunities for interdisciplinary discourse and practical collaboration to which these overlaps give rise.