Give Me All Your Money and I’ll Make Some Origami

The study of graphic design is currently moving in an area of tension: on the one hand, critically thinking individuals are to be formed there, who on the other hand are to quickly gain a foothold in a market that demands less criticism from them, but affirmation instead. Can these two aspects of training and education be harmonized? Is a freer kind of education possible at design universities that deals differently with the boundaries of individual disciplines and regularities in curricula?

This reader is a utopian representation of a graphic design study whose contents and structures are more oriented towards Origami instead of Money. “Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami”—this line from the song Pedestrian at best by Courtney Barnett forms the title of this work. It opens up a field of tension in which artists and designers move in capitalist economic systems and gives expression to the ambiguous relationship of art and creative workers to (earning) money through various readings. Through ideas of reform pedagogy and a focus on works of art and design history, this reader provides visual and theoretical approaches to formulate a counter-proposal.

The book is divided into four chapters. It starts with an introduction providing historical background, followed by three chapters that explore a poetic, a communal, and a philosophical approach to graphic design.

The book’s format is not rectangular but intentionally distorted. The idea behind this is that, when opened, the book resembles an icon commonly used to symbolize “reading” or “learning”—an open book.

Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami

The reader was created as part of Marcel Backscheider’s master’s thesis in Communication Design at Hochschule Mainz. His work mainly focuses on typography, editorial design, visual concepts, and printed matter.
Further information here.