Erik Carter: Design Harder

Books Ideas, 2025, hardcover, 220 pages, 12.7 x 19.7 cm

As the graphic design industry faces new cultural and ethical challenges, Design Harder offers a timely response.

Written by Erik Carter, an influential voice whose work bridges commercial design and critical discourse, the book challenges readers to reconsider what graphic design can be. Through seven interconnected essays, Carter probes the purpose, power, and potential future of the field—inviting readers to imagine a more sustainable and equitable artistic practice while offering the tools to reform the industry for the better.

In close collaboration with designer and editor Aryn Beitz, Carter channels his distinctive style into an incisive, illuminating, and ultimately hope-filled recontextualization of the graphic design industry at large. Building off ideas Carter has been exploring over the last decade, this new collection is steeped within not only a biting criticism, but a pure, unfiltered love for graphic design. 

With a foreword by Christina Janus and Desmond Wong of AUTHENTIC, Design Harder is—in Carter’s own words—“an effort to collectively overcome the issues plaguing the industry and usher in a new era of this practice that I love so deeply.” Join him, and together, let’s design harder.