"Originally published in French as Graphisme, Typographie, Histoire. Flammarion, Paris, 2005"--col.

Part 1. From antiquity to modern times : archaic signs, figures, and writing ; The middle ages: graphic design as cottage industry ; Techniques and materials: paper, printing, and composition ; The Renaissance: fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ; The passage from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries ; The Neoclassical period -- Part 2. The long nineteenth century : Decisive changes ; A revival in the arts and graphics ; Affirmations of modernity -- Part 3. The first third of the twentieth century : The avant-garde floodtide -- World War I -- Continuation and reconstruction in the avant-garde -- Part 4. From the rise of totalitarianism to World War II : Totalitarianism: the avant-garde exile and survival ; World War II -- Part 5. Postwar economic boom : Characteristics and horizons ; Creativity and trends country by country ; Professionalism and expansion -- Part 6. The final decades of the twentieth century : Pre-digital graphic design: context and overview ; Experimentation in the 1970s ; The advent of digital design ; Widespread freedom.

"The author received the André Ferran prize of the Académie de Toulouse in 2005 for the reserarch compiled in this book." --cont.