‘It all started with us being fed up of hearing Marshall McLuhan's name once too often in our Visual Communication MA at the Royal College of Art. We wish we could have kept a tally of how many times his name came up.’1 This is how our book Not a Reference Yet starts. In this text we are going back to the beginning of our venture and what got us started. Simply put, we noticed a missing gap in the references we were looking for. Digging a little deeper, we started to see the mechanisms in place that stop a reference from being found or even to exist in the first place. We are both graphic designers and, in this research, we focus on our own industry, however, this problem seems to be fairly universal and applies to many industries – especially those in which representation plays a big role.