This illustration is part of a series commissioned by Meg Miller of AIGA Eye on Design, the leading platform on visual design in the United States, adorning a series of essays by design educator Aggie Toppins on graphic design history.

This time Toppins writes about the limitations of treating graphic design history solely as the history of the industry, rather than of visual culture as well.

If the first image of the series depicted a pearl opening on a blank new world, and in the second the pearl initiates a vortex of movement into the unknown, in this third instalment the pearls multiply and trace paths to reference the multiplicity of visual cultures Toppins speaks about. They also reference the movement of the eye that beautiful visual compositions engage—the visual curiosity; the eagerness to “see more". 

The final image is a piece in between a trajectory of pearls, a summer dream, and an underwater world.