Image: El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Kunstimen ("Artisms") book cover, 1925. From Ryan, p. 83.

Ultimately, artists, poets, and commercial graphic designers all came to see the importance of written language’s visual properties. Their mutually-influencing experimentation and innovation ultimately brought about radical changes in the way we perceive words on a page.

But by the end of the 1930s, Drucker explains, "the visual codes of earlier avant-garde activity became subsumed under the well-ordered behaviors of advertising display," evolving into today’s highly developed art of graphic design. "Once coded in this manner, they were returned to literary practice only much later, in concrete poetry, and then with new poetic strategies designed to rework the relations of visual form and verbal meaning" (Drucker, 240).