How design’s oldest org torched a decade of discourse
When AIGA Eye on Design vanished overnight, it exposed a troubling lack of stewardship in preserving our industry’s legacy. How can we ensure our design history endures in the digital age?
Remember the joke that “the internet is forever”? Well, it turns out that’s only true if someone cares enough to keep it that way. Last month, the design community was rocked by the sudden disappearance of AIGA Eye on Design, a publication that had been chronicling the ins and outs of the design industry since it was founded by the imitable Perrin Drumm in 2014.
The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), our industry’s oldest and largest professional organization, decided to take down the site as part of a “data migration” project. Their solution? Keep only the “most accessed” articles and tell readers to use the Wayback Machine for everything else. (Revealing a startling lack of understanding of how the internet, web preservation and maintenance works—also, did they reach out to the nonprofit to see if this would be a suitable, long-term solution?)
Cue the collective outcry.
As someone who’s been in this industry for over a decade (and who has both a defunct studio and tweet memorialized on the site), I’m both furious and disheartened. AIGA Eye on Design wasn’t just a blog—it was an archive of our field’s evolution, a platform that amplified community voices, and a resource countless designers relied on. Its unceremonious deletion is nothing short of negligence.
But this isn’t just about nostalgia or hurt feelings. It’s about the very real consequences of erasing our shared history. As @practisetheory aptly puts it (on @briarlevit’s Instagram post): “Isn’t it incredible, the apparent contempt that @aigadesign has for everyone. Their opacity and apparently disorganised behaviour, causing valued (and BUSY) writers and contributors to scramble like this as they dither and backtrack [...] Clearly no strategy or sense of stewardship at all for their important role as a national (and, really, international) design organisation. Truly astounding.”
As designer Elizabeth Goodspeed comments on LinkedIn, “End of an era!” Truly! Ten whole years of design discourse and documentation yeeted into the digital abyss.
This incident raises some crucial questions:
Who is responsible for preserving our industry’s legacy in the digital age?
How can we ensure the continuity of design discourse when platforms can vanish overnight?
What does this say about AIGA’s understanding of the modern design landscape?
The silver lining in all of this has been the community’s response. Designers like Briar Levit mobilized quickly, sharing instructions for archiving articles and uploading them to The People’s Graphic Design Archive. The volunteer collective, Archive Team, did a scrape of the existing site and uploaded it to archive.org. It’s a grassroots effort to preserve what AIGA deemed disposable. (Under the heat, AIGA hastily reversed course, temporarily restoring access to the site. But our trust?)
We shouldn’t have to rely on last-minute scrambles and volunteer efforts to safeguard our history. We need robust, forward-thinking solutions that balance the need for streamlined digital properties with the responsibility of archival stewardship.
So, what can we do?
Support and contribute to community-led archiving efforts like The People’s Graphic Design Archive and Archive Team
Advocate for better digital preservation practices within our professional organizations (hey, a contact form!)
Create and maintain our own archives of important design writing and resources
Engage in conversations about the importance of design history and criticism
Look, I get it. Running a massive org isn’t easy. But you know what else isn’t easy? Building a respected publication from the ground up. Cultivating a robust masthead of voices. Documenting a decade of design evolution. And AIGA nearly flushed it all for... what? More server space? A cleaner sitemap?
Our work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every project, every article, every discussion is part of a larger narrative that shapes our field. We owe it to ourselves and future generations of designers to ensure that narrative isn’t lost to the whims of data migration or budget cuts.
In the spirit of substance with style, let’s commit to not just creating work, but also preserving the context and conversations that surround it. Our history is too valuable to leave in the hands of those who don’t understand its worth. As Golan Levin advises: “If you like something online, stash a copy of it.”
P.S. If you’ve contributed to AIGA Eye on Design or have favorite articles you’d like to preserve, check out Briar Levit’s instructions for archiving. Let’s ensure these pieces of design writing don’t disappear into the digital ether.
What are your thoughts? How can we better preserve and promote design discourse? Hit reply and let me know—because I don’t have the answer. (But I’m thinking on it!)
—Carly
AIGA has been a disaster ever since the internet came on the scene, despite many well-meaning efforts to save it from itself. It's not just Eye on Design that they torched, but every bit of thinking and writing (and money) that was casually entrusted to them over the last thirty years. I don't blame AIGA, though – I blame us for expecting that AIGA could somehow be both the professional and intellectual steward of a poorly defined (and dissolving) discipline.
What do "real" disciplines do? They create and fund centers at universities that have the institutional infrastructure to take care of shit over a long period of time. They index their writing so that it can be retrieved through interconnected libraries, which are now mostly digital. They don't ignore their university programs and let them become ATM machines for flagging schools and departments. Their professional organizations establish standard, advocate for their professions, and connect institutions.
I don't think it's too late to rethink how we take care of the knowledge and discourse of the last thirty years. AIGA is not the answer – no one thing is the answer.
AIGA used to employee a brilliant archivist, Heather Strelecki. I suspect if she hadn’t been “restructured out” they might have pursued other options and handled this differently. In my years there I know we cared a lot about preserving design and investing in the discourse around it. I don’t know the organization’s current finances but am sad to see how poorly they handled Eye on Design, which had exactly the type of online community and readership that we wished we could have built when we relaunched aiga.org (c. 2011). Massive kudos to Perrin and everyone who made it the success it was. I’m so sorry to see what’s become of it.