International Journal of Visual Design

About International Journal of Visual Design

The International Journal of Visual Design — Journal Profile

The International Journal of Visual Design is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal for research on visual design — how images, type, interfaces and designed visual artefacts are conceived, produced, perceived and used — published in the United States by Common Ground Research Networks as part of its Design Principles and Practices Research Network. It carries print ISSN 2325-1581 and online ISSN 2325-159X, the pair stored on this JournalsWorld record, printed on the journal's own issues, and grouped together in its OpenAlex source record, and its articles carry DOIs under the journal DOI stem 10.18848/2325-1581/CGP. The journal's own front matter states that it publishes twice a year, in June and December, and that its articles are peer reviewed under a two-way anonymous model by reviewers drawn from the Design Principles and Practices Research Network and thematically related networks, working to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) core practices. Its editors, named in the journal's front matter, are Lorenzo Imbesi and Loredana Di Lucchio, both of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Listings record the journal's coverage from 2013, and its volume numbering reached volume 16 in 2022 and volume 12 in 2018 on the evidence of its published issues — a steady annual volume with two issues a year.

At a Glance

The journal and its network — how Common Ground publishing works

To understand this journal, start with its publisher's model, because it differs from both the society journal and the large commercial journal. Common Ground Research Networks, based in the University of Illinois Research Park in Champaign, Illinois, organises its publishing around research networks: scholarly communities built around an annual conference, a family of journals, a book imprint and a shared software platform (CGScholar). The Design Principles and Practices Research Network is one of those communities, and The International Journal of Visual Design is one of a family of focused journals serving it. The network's journal family, as described in the network's own publications, comprises an annual-review journal for the whole field — Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal — Annual Review — and six thematically focused journals covering architectonic, spatial and environmental design; design education; design in society; design management and professional practice; designed objects; and visual design. This journal is the visual-design member of that family: the home, inside the network, for work whose object is the visual itself.

The network model has practical consequences that authors should understand. Reviewers are, in the journal's own front-matter wording, active participants of the Design Principles and Practices Research Network or a thematically related network, and the publisher, editors, reviewers and authors all subscribe to shared ethical standards based on the COPE core practices. The journal is typeset in CGScholar, the publisher's platform, and its issues carry a standard front cover recording the editors, the advisory arrangements of the network and the submission pattern. Copyright in individual papers rests with their authors, and copyright in the gathered issue with Common Ground Research Networks, as the front matter states. The journal's postal identity has been constant through its run — Common Ground, University of Illinois Research Park, 2001 South First Street, Suite 202, Champaign, IL 61820, USA — with the publisher formerly styled Common Ground Publishing before adopting the Common Ground Research Networks name, a change visible when comparing the 2013 and later front covers.

Within design research, the journal occupies a defined niche. Design is a wide field — the network's annual-review journal describes its conversation as traversing anthropology, architecture, art, business, cognitive science, communication studies, computer science, cultural studies, education, engineering, ergonomics, fashion, graphic design, information systems, industrial design, interaction and interface design, media, psychology, sociology, urban planning and visual design among other perspectives — and no single journal can hold all of that at depth. The focused journals exist so that each conversation has a room of its own. The visual-design room is where questions about the seen artefact belong: typography and graphic form, visual communication, image-making, visual ergonomics, interface appearance, data and information visualisation in its visual aspect, and the cultural study of visual artefacts. The published record bears that out, as the next section shows article by article.

Scope — what the journal actually publishes

OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's contents, from the source record resolved at checking time, groups its output under five heads: digital media and visual art; graphic design and typography; innovative human-technology interaction; cultural and communication design research; and usability and user interface design. That bibliometric picture matches what a reader finds in the issues themselves. Three published articles, drawn from different volumes, show the range concretely. A 2018 article on film and television production as audiovisual design argued, from interviews and industry literature, that film and television making should be analysed as design — defining production strata and sub-processes and clarifying what directors, designers and craftspeople each contribute to the finished audiovisual artefact. A 2022 article on visual ergonomics for colourblindness examined how desktop graphical user interfaces afford, or fail to afford, effective use by colour-blind users — visual design meeting human-computer interaction and accessibility. A 2021 studio-based article from the Politecnico di Milano's communication design programme studied how independent social magazines are designed and how their visual form helps them act as cultural activators, gathering diversified communities around shared issues. Audiovisual design, interface ergonomics and editorial design are different crafts, but the questions asked of them here are the journal's questions: how is this visual thing designed, for whom, and with what effects?

Earlier volumes show the same pattern at the field's more theoretical end. The journal's sixth volume (2013 in the listings' coverage) carried, for example, a study of the visualisation of knowledge domains in user-experience research, using factor analysis and network techniques to map the key authors and research topics of user-experience scholarship itself — a reflexive, methods-conscious piece typical of the journal's willingness to publish work about how visual research is done, alongside work that does it. Research trends, mapping and visualisation methods; typographic and graphic systems; visual identity; design for screens; the aesthetics of designed images, including historical topics such as Brazilian concrete poetry, which the journal has also published — all of this sits inside the remit, provided the visual is the object of study rather than an illustration of an argument about something else. Work whose centre is industrial product engineering, architecture as construction, or computing with no visual-design question belongs in the sibling journals of the network family or elsewhere, and the network structure makes that redirection natural.

Geographically, the journal is genuinely international in authorship. Its published articles come from design schools and universities across Europe, the Americas and Asia — the examples above alone involve authors in Sweden, India, Italy, Colombia and Mexico — reflecting the conference-and-network base from which its community is drawn and the Roman editorship of its recent volumes. For an author outside the traditional anglophone journal centres, that breadth is part of the journal's appeal: the conversation is organised by topic, not by country.

Editors and peer review

The journal's front matter names Lorenzo Imbesi and Loredana Di Lucchio, both of Sapienza University of Rome, as its editors, with the network's advisory board — drawn from the Design Principles and Practices Research Network — responsible, in the front matter's words, for driving the overall intellectual direction of the network. Production roles named in recent front covers include a head of journal production and a managing editor at Common Ground Research Networks in the United States, which reflects the split typical of this publisher: scholarly direction from academic editors in the field, production and platform from the publisher's Champaign office. Authors should confirm the current masthead on the journal's page within the Design Principles and Practices site (designprinciplesandpractices.com) before submitting, since editorships in network journals rotate and the front cover of the most recent issue is the authoritative statement.

Peer review is described precisely in the journal's own front matter, and this profile reports it in those terms: articles published in The International Journal of Visual Design are peer reviewed using a two-way anonymous peer review model — neither author nor reviewer knows the other's identity — and reviewers are active participants of the Design Principles and Practices Research Network or a thematically related research network. The publisher, editors, reviewers and authors all agree to standards of expected ethical behaviour based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) core practices, and the front matter points readers to the publisher's publication-ethics page for the full statement. For authors, the network element of this model matters in practice: your reviewers are likely to be working design researchers from the same community, often met through the network's conference, and manuscripts that speak to that community's ongoing conversations — citing its journals, engaging its debates — are the manuscripts the model is built to assess.

Metrics, indexing and how to read them

The journal is a small, young title by the standards of this directory, and its metrics should be read at that scale. The thin listing that this profile replaces recorded an h-index of 7, drawn from the Scopus-based data behind that listing, with coverage 2013–2025. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through the ISSN endpoint at checking time (October 2026) as source S4210173167, records 239 works and 297 citations, a summary h-index of 8, an i10-index of 6 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.56. Its year counts show the journal's steady rhythm: 26 works in 2013, 19 in 2014 and 23 in 2015 in the years OpenAlex lists at the start of the run, consistent with two modest issues a year. Secondary Scopus-based summaries have put the journal in the third quartile (Q3) for visual arts and performing arts and the fourth quartile for architecture, with a SCImago Journal Rank around 0.10 — modest numbers that describe a specialist community journal, and that matter less, for this title, than whether a paper reaches the design-research audience the network assembles.

The journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals: a DOAJ search by either of its ISSNs at checking time returned no listing. That is a statement about directory coverage, not about quality — DOAJ lists open access journals, and this title operates on Common Ground's standard journal model rather than as a fully open access title — but authors whose funders require a DOAJ-listed venue should register the fact. Discovery of its contents runs through the publisher's own platform and journal site, Crossref (its DOI stem is visible in every article's citation), OpenAlex, and the Scopus coverage behind the secondary rankings quoted above. Individual articles also circulate widely as author manuscripts and through academic sharing platforms, which is how many readers in design practice, who lack library subscriptions, encounter the journal.

Access and fees

The journal's articles are published by Common Ground Research Networks under its standard arrangements: copyright in individual papers remains with the authors, as the front matter states, and some articles are published under Creative Commons licences — a 2018 article in volume 12, for example, is marked CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with permissions handled through the publisher — giving those articles free-to-read status with restricted reuse. No article processing charge or submission fee figure for this journal could be verified from a publisher source fetched for this profile, and none is quoted: Common Ground's fee arrangements are stated inside its CGScholar submission workflow and on its journal pages, and authors should take the current figure from there at the moment of submission rather than from any secondary summary, this one included. What can be said generally is that the network model ties journals to a conference community, so authors should also check whether participation routes — conference presentation feeding journal submission — affect their costs and timelines in a given year.

How to submit

Submission is made through Common Ground's systems, reached from the journal's home within the Design Principles and Practices Research Network site; the journal's front matter directs authors to that site for the submission process, and manuscripts are prepared and submitted through the publisher's CGScholar platform. Practical preparation follows from the journal's identity. Frame the paper around a visual-design question that a design researcher — not only a specialist in your sub-craft — can follow: state the designed object or practice under study, the method used to study it, and what the study changes about how such things should be designed or understood. Write for the network's international readership, define local terms, and make images do analytical work: in this journal, figures are evidence, and a paper about visual design whose own visuals are decorative will strike its reviewers as missing its own point. Length, formatting and fee details should be taken from the current submission pages, which the publisher updates as its platform evolves.

Similar journals

Within the same network family, authors whose work sits at the visual edge of a neighbouring topic should compare the International Journal of Design Education, the International Journal of Designed Objects, the International Journal of Design in Society, the International Journal of Design Management and Professional Practice and the International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, together with the family's annual-review journal. Outside the family, the natural comparisons are the International Journal of Design (open access, broad design scope), The Design Journal (the European Academy of Design's journal), Design Studies and Visible Language for visual communication and typography, and — within this directory — the International Journal of Graphic Design (a separate, Indonesian title with different ISSNs, profiled on its own JournalsWorld post) and the Journal of Graphic Engineering and Design. These are distinct journals with distinct ISSNs and publishers; none is an edition of this title, and each should be checked on its own record.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of The International Journal of Visual Design? Print ISSN 2325-1581 and online ISSN 2325-159X, printed on the journal's issues and stored on this JournalsWorld record.

Who publishes it? Common Ground Research Networks, of Champaign, Illinois, United States, as part of the Design Principles and Practices Research Network.

Who edits it? The journal's front matter names Lorenzo Imbesi and Loredana Di Lucchio, both of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Confirm the current masthead on the journal's site before submitting.

How often does it appear? Twice a year, in June and December, per the journal's front matter, in annual volumes — volume 16 appeared in 2022.

How are articles reviewed? By two-way anonymous peer review, with reviewers drawn from the Design Principles and Practices Research Network or related networks, under ethical standards based on the COPE core practices.

What are its metrics? Source-dependent and modest, as befits a specialist title: the old JournalsWorld listing gave an h-index of 7; OpenAlex (source S4210173167, checked October 2026) records 239 works, 297 citations and a summary h-index of 8; Scopus-based summaries have placed it in Q3 for visual arts and performing arts.

Is it open access or DOAJ-listed? Individual articles appear under Creative Commons licences, but the journal is not a fully open access title and a DOAJ search by ISSN at checking time returned no listing. No fee figure could be verified from a publisher source for this profile.

What DOI do its articles carry? DOIs are built on the journal stem 10.18848/2325-1581/CGP, followed by volume, issue and page information for each article.

Sources and verification

This profile was researched in October 2026 from: the journal's own published front covers and article front matter across several volumes (ISSN pair, DOI stem, publisher address, editors, two-way anonymous review statement, COPE basis, June and December publication pattern, copyright and licence lines); the Design Principles and Practices network's descriptions of its journal family (the six focused journals and the annual-review title); the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 2325-1581 (source S4210173167; works, citations, summary statistics, topics, yearly counts); secondary Scopus-based ranking summaries (quartile placements and coverage); DOAJ searches by both ISSNs, which returned no listing; and the pre-existing JournalsWorld record (ISSN pair, country, coverage 2013–2025, h-index 7), checked against those sources. No fee figure is stated because none could be verified from a publisher source fetched for this profile.