The record of history is inherently problematic: it is subjective and fractured, making our understanding of any civilization inherently incomplete. Irish literature is one measure of Irish cultural history, but this chapter considers a parallel history of creative expression, Irish design, to explore how the modernist afterlife became manifest through architecture, graphic design and other popular forms. Design history is the study of ideas in material and visual form; it is not merely concerned with aesthetics and the skill of making, but with what objects and images reveal about the cultural, political and economic factors from which they emerge. In design terms, as in other realms, modernism as a historical and conceptual category is a term in flux. Despite modernism's stated intention to comprise a universal ideology, historians – including Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger – argue that modernity embodies both ‘continuity and rupture’, which necessitates the investigation of ‘modernities’ as opposed to understanding modernism as an all-encompassing and monolithic concept. Design historian David Crowley expands this thesis by arguing that modernism is localized within specific cultural and national contexts. He regards the emergence of regional inflections and interpretations as ‘national’ or ‘regional’ modernisms, an approach that speaks to the recent acknowledgement of a distinct Irish or vernacular modernism, a negotiated form of expression closely aligned with nation-building and state sponsored projects.

If the afterlife of Irish literary modernism arises after the publication of Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), this marks the period when modernism in design came into its fullest expression. Modernism is somewhat easier to define in material and visual terms than in the context of literature or other fields where definitions can be contested. Design historian Peter Greenhalgh offers that there were three phases to historical modernism in relation to design: Proto-Modernism, which signalled the break with historicism that emerged in the materiality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…