Resource List: Designing across cultures and contexts

Visual communication designers convey meaning through visual form, and that meaning is shaped by how audiences perceive information. Perception varies across cultures and contexts.

Decisions about colour, typography, composition and imagery are never neutral. These choices are interpreted through cultural reference points that influence how messages are understood and how people respond to them.

In Canada, this awareness is especially important. Designers work within a pluralistic society that includes Indigenous peoples, long-established settlers and newcomers from around the world. Designing responsibly means recognizing the different ways people interpret visual information and moving beyond familiar visual defaults.

Designing across cultures is an ongoing process of engaging with perspectives and contexts beyond our own. The resources gathered here offer reference points for understanding how culture shapes visual language and interpretation.

Ways of Seeing

John Berger, 1972

Ways of Seeing is a reference centred on visual culture that many designers will already be familiar with. First published in the early 1970s, the book examines how images communicate meaning through systems of power and cultural convention. Berger looks at painting, advertising, television and photography, tracing how ways of seeing are shaped by history, economics and social position.

Structured as a series of short essays, some adapted from a BBC television series, the book uses direct language and clear examples to unpack how images frame value, gender and authority. Through close visual analysis, Berger shows how context alters interpretation when images are reproduced or paired with text.

For visual communication designers, Ways of Seeing remains a useful grounding text. It offers a shared vocabulary for thinking about representation and meaning and encourages renewed attention to the cultural frameworks through which images are interpreted.

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The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication

Ruben Pater, 2016

The Politics of Design quietly reshapes how designers think about their work. Framed as a compact manual, the book examines the cultural and political contexts embedded in the visual communication tools and systems designers rely on. Pater’s central argument is that nothing in visual communication is neutral: typefaces, colours, visual systems and even the tools used to measure and reproduce images carry cultural and political assumptions. The book makes these assumptions visible without overstating the case.

Global case studies give the book much of its depth, documenting situations where visual approaches considered standard in one context led to confusion, exclusion or misinterpretation in another. These examples reveal how visual conventions are often treated as universal when they are culturally specific, encouraging designers to question where visual systems come from and how they became normalized.

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The Secret Lives of Colour

Kassia St. Clair, 2016

The Secret Lives of Colour explores how colour has been produced, named and interpreted across cultures and historical periods. Organized as short essays on 75 hues, the book traces the social, political, scientific and emotional contexts attached to each one, situating colour within religion, class, geography, art history and material culture. Together, the entries show how colour meaning develops through use and association over time.

Each essay stands on its own, making the book easy to read in short sections. Blending research with storytelling, the writing is accessible while offering depth, allowing designers to engage with cultural histories of colour without needing to read the book cover to cover.

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Cross-Cultural Design

Senongo Akpem, 2023

Cross-Cultural Design presents practical approaches to designing for audiences whose cultural experiences differ from those of the designer. While many examples are drawn from digital products and interfaces, the concepts apply broadly to visual communication across formats. The book examines how cultural assumptions shape visual decisions and how designers can address difference more deliberately.

It introduces methods for culturally informed research and analysis, along with frameworks for understanding how values, norms and expectations influence interpretation. Case studies and personal reflections connect these ideas to everyday design practice.

A central theme is attention to cultural context as an ongoing part of visual communication work. Akpem frames cultural difference as a condition designers work within rather than a problem to solve, offering language and methods that support clearer communication and more informed visual decision-making in multicultural settings.

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Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada

Royal Canadian Geographical Society, 2018–ongoing

The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada is a collaborative visual and narrative reference that shares the histories, lands, cultures and worldviews of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples across the country. It brings together maps, stories, timelines, language information and illustrations to present perspectives that have been historically marginalized in mainstream narratives. The atlas centres Indigenous ways of knowing and representing space, identity and community, often through visual forms that differ from Western traditions.

For visual designers working with Indigenous contexts, this resource offers visual frameworks created by and in partnership with, Indigenous contributors. It reinforces that representation is not only about accuracy but also about context and agency. Engaging with Indigenous approaches to visualizing land, relationships and histories helps designers better understand how visual meaning is shaped by Indigenous worldviews.

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Designing across cultures and contexts means integrating perspectives beyond one’s own. The resources in this list can inform such work from many different angles, including visual systems, cultural history, colour, contemporary practice and place-based knowledge. Taken together, they support a broader visual vocabulary and a clearer understanding of how meaning is shaped, interpreted and communicated across cultural contexts.

 

For readers interested in exploring cultural context through writing systems and language, the RGD article Multi-script typography resources to bookmark now offers a complementary set of references focused on multi-script typography. It provides additional resources that expand how cultural knowledge operates within typographic systems and multilingual visual communication.