He was a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London from 1994 to 1999 and returned to the RCA in 2006 as a research fellow.
In 2004, Poynor curated the exhibition, Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties, at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.
[5] Poynor's writing encompasses both cultural criticism and design history, and his books break down into three categories.
In 2020, Yale University Press published his book about the work of graphic designer David King.
[6] In 2023, Occasional Papers published Why Graphic Culture Matters, a collection of 46 of his essays written over the past two decades.