On Design, Feminism, and Friendship

(Levit, 2024)

Abstract

The review presents Briar Levit's volume as a hybrid text — part memoir, part pedagogical manifesto, part methodological reflection — that recounts in dialogic and chronologically progressive form the author's personal and professional trajectory through the interweaving of graphic design, feminism, and the practice of friendship as a mode of collective knowledge-building. Structured in three sections, the book moves through Levit's experience as art director of Bitch Magazine, her teaching practice oriented towards autonomous thinking and horizontal exchange between teacher and student, and her commitment to the collaborative archive The People's Graphic Design Archive and the edited volume Baseline Shift (2021). The review situates the book within the growing critical corpus addressing feminism in design: not merely as a question of representation, but as a rethinking of practices, historical canons, and disciplinary hierarchies, with the aim of constructing more inclusive narratives capable of giving voice to marginal histories and dismantling the binary structures that have long shaped the international history of graphic design.