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SHORT poster. Check out pages from the book on VA's website.
Just when you thought enrolling your kids in yoga and teaching them Japanese was enough, Sydney based firm, VA, has developed a coloring book for the artistically cultural elite. Limited to 1,000 copies worldwide, SHORT is an 82-page masterpiece filled with outlined works from selected artists and designers that your child (or who are we kidding, you) color yourself. And—bonus—every book comes with a poster by Stefan Marx and Chris Hopkins. Later this year high-end Japanese fashion label, BEAMS plans to run a line of limited-edition VA Editions | SHORT tees taken from the features of seven SHORT artists. Currently the only distributors are in Australia, Japan and the UK, but that shouldn't stop you from dreaming up your own fancy coloring book right in your own studio.
Posted by: Alison | Comments (0)
An enormous orange compendium, The Endless City approaches architecture itself in scale, scope and design. All of the little details are right, from its visually comfortable grid to the stunning panoramic long-exposure photos of cities and urban sprawl. The result of a joint project between The London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, the book contains so much data, information and statistics that some facts even needed to spill some over onto the cover. Despite the imposing cover, the information and opinions within prove not only to educate but also to inspire.
Before discussing any book on urban planning, it's worth first addressing the elephant in the room, and her name is Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs stands as a triumph of urban planning literature. By criticizing the architecture establishment and deriding the work of Robert Moses in reshaping New York, Jacobs entrenched herself into the urban planning cannon. Jacobs' work is small, accessible, and heartfelt. Anyone who has ever walked through an empty park, or pondered why portions of cities that governments push toward growth often fall into disarray would be well served examining her work. The Death and Life of Great American Cities reads as a cautionary tale for anyone hoping to adopt Le Corbusier's towers and parks as a mode for urban planning (as though walking past any project in America wouldn't be enough). Jacobs speaks lovingly about the diversity of the city streets, the need for a heterogeneous population and a "neighborhood" actively engaged in monitoring or policing its own behavior and growth. Walking down the quirky and vibrant streets of lower Manhattan, I can't help but feel that any other thesis would be tragically misguided. Consequently, I remained concerned until reading this book that urban planners might still hold some megalomaniacal tendencies. I was proven wrong only part way into the introduction and I still had a lot more to learn.
Exhibits like Bodies at the South Street Seaport and the Darwin Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History may be capable of producing both wonder and horror, but not all visitors may realize the history of the discipline behind them. What is Exhibition Design illuminates the thread of history spanning from the cabinets of curiosities popular in the Renaissance, through church reliquaries, worlds fairs, and department stores. The journey brings the reader all the way to our present-day knockdown displays and provides a tour of the process behind their creation along with striking images of the results.
Zen Buddhism has a history of impermanent art. From the fleeting beauty of a sandpainted Tibetan mandala to a carefully pruned bonsai tree, it is accepted that all beautiful things must come to an end. Christopher Salyers's Face Food continues that tradition ... or maybe that's a stretch.
Perhaps instead, Face Food is simply a continuation of Japan's endless search for the new, the faddish and the inexplicably bizarre. Face Food catalogues the obsessive craftsmanship of Japanese parents who mould their children's school lunches into manga masterpieces. Yes, that's not decorating the bento box, but actually making art out of the food itself. The book is a compendium of occasionally masterful and often gaudy collections of vegetables, noodles, and even fish cakes that have been died and shaped into murals and mosaics of manga and anime characters, animals and even more fanciful creations. Otaku rejoice!
To all those who slaved over blue foam and chip-board models, who sprayed one too many Krylon cans dry (wearing a mask, of course), Richard Sennett's latest book is your new bible.
"The Craftsman", aptly titled, is a conglomerate of case studies that explore the relationship of hand to mind, craftsmanship to Enlightenment. Herein, Sennett, a renown London-based sociologist with a zest for the human experience (and a great cellist - who knew?!), argues that the most basic, fundamental ability we humans share is that of craft. When properly trained, this process functions as muscle memory, literally training the mind while working the hand. If its up to Sennett, all those hours spent learning how to throw clay pots, plane wood, and mix plaster for some toy-design/coffee-maker/mobile-phone project actually might just make you, the designer-cum-craftsman, a more enlightened person,
And what is it that such persons know? They know how to negotiate between autonomy and authority (as one must in any workshop); how to work not against resistant forces but with them (as did the engineers who first drilled tunnels beneath the Thames); how to complete their tasks using 'minimum force' (as do all chefs who must chop vegetables); how to meet people and things with sympathetic imagination (as does the glassblower whose 'corporeal anticipation' lets her stay one step ahead of the molten glass); and above all they know how to play, for it is in play that we find 'the origin of the dialogue the craftsman conducts with materials like clay and glass.
So what's in it for the designer? Proof that maybe, as we all suspected, process is king. From the computer screen to the workshop table, it's the stuff we've known for years: think, make, share, and do it again. It's what we wake up to do every morning, and what we dream about at night. Now if only Sennett could convince the boss to give me a raise...
illustration by Leif Parsons via the New York Times
Posted by: elle* | Comments (1)
When I was a little kid learning to draw, I always had the deepest admiration for comic book artists, along with a profound misconception. Upon actually purchasing a Marvel, DC, or later an Image publication, the reader sees only crisp, perfect drawings, with no construction lines. You see, many artists proffer an illusion. There are several steps to making a comic: In the first step, the artist sketches out a rough with a pencil, complete with construction lines (often this is done on a much larger scale than the final page, so large errors appear small when it's printed). Second, an "inker" comes in and goes over the rough sketch with a pen, darkening only the ideal lines and ignoring errors. Then finally, the "colorist" lays a palate of color over the work.
So for the viewer, the final result omits much of the work that went on in making a "perfect" layout. This sort of trickery is pervasive in art, where artists ranging from Van Gogh to Vermeer may have used a variety of tools like the grid or the camera obscura to attain accurate proportions. Thus a subterfuge has been pulled over the eyes of the viewing public, who are left thinking that artists possess talent beyond their own, when actually a lot of the work that went into art has been erased or covered up and reworked with oils.
As someone who has gone to art school and seen that the act of repetitive practice can turn a mediocre sketcher into someone the world sees as "talented," I have no trouble understanding where Dan Roam is coming from in his book The Back of the Napkin when he speaks to his readers about visual thinking. Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not people can draw when they present their ideas. All the errant lines and mistakes that they make when drawing under pressure contribute to a sense of immediacy and urgency in the final product.
Roam is a consultant by trade, and I trust that he won't take offense when I say that while his "back of the napkin" sketches lack the technical prowess of a Rembrant or DaVinci, his simple line drawings are clear, concise and evocative of the emotional verve one sees (and casually discounts) in the "funny pages." This, of course, is precisely the point of his book: simple sketches are often more compelling than technically adept Power Point slides.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (1)
One of the most remarkable things about reading the interviews contained in Debbie Millman's How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer is noticing just how many of the interviewees seemed to know even in their earliest memories that graphic design was their calling. For the reader hoping that the book will live up to its titular promises, learning that the childhoods of many iconic designers already showed indications of their future promise may be disheartening. That said, in any examination of Millman's interviews of established design figures such as Stefan Sagmeister and Michael Bierut, the reader would be remiss in forgetting the value of hindsight. No less than Milton Glaser puts it best in his own interview. When asked about his first creative memory, he responds, "My memory of the past is that there are so many areas that are opaque, and I feel that there are so many areas that I made up later in life."
In some ways, everyone is entitled to writing their own stories, and after a lifetime of design, it's not surprising that successful designers look back on their childhoods as idyllically creative. Paradoxically, many of the designers whose earliest memories were of art still had trouble finding graphic design as a career path. Instead, they approached the field tangentially, embracing graphic design after becoming dissatisfied with fine art, or suddenly realizing the beauty of a layout or a typeface.
As the introduction states, Millman herself knows that the question of how to think like a great graphic designer is not an appropriate topic for a self-help book. Instead, it may be more like receiving the Dharma. As the host of Design Matters, an internet radio talk show, she is quite accustomed to the give and take of a lively Q&A and her questions reveal that fluidity. How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer offers outsiders a rare glimpse into the minds of designers; and they are a multifaceted bunch, united largely by early creative memories, truly philosophical levels of introspection, and most profoundly, a sense of humor (more on that later).
Given the title, however, the prospective reader must wonder what prescriptive advice could be gleaned from the book's pages, I can recommend the following totally unrelated recurrent habitual behaviors: early morning jogs, a borderline compulsion for order, a complete embrace of creative destruction, tenacity and occasional forced isolation. I also couldn't help but observe that that while designing record covers in the seventies and eighties seems to lead inextricably to dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in design at the new millennia; a willingness to take on a variety of clients and jobs seems to generate lasting happiness.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (1)
The opening sentence of Kenya Hara's recent book Designing Design states that "verbalizing design is another act of design." For those of us involved as much in design criticism as "design" itself, those are welcome words. They stand in stark contrast to another popular maxim, "Those who can't do, teach," so common in Western business circles. By actively thinking about the process and ethos of design as much as the end product itself, Hara has created a work that reads more like a mandate for ethical product design than as an indulgent graphic design book destined to rest on yet another modern coffee table.
Designing Design serves as a near-perfect companion piece to the Naoto Fukasawa monograph reviewed here some weeks ago. This comparison is appropriate, since both Fukasawa and Hara devote much of their energy to the minimalist Japanese firm MUJI. While some may take the "branding" of MUJI as a "brandless brand" to be a supreme act of hubris or pretension, the firm's emphasis on recycling, simplicity and waste reduction seems presciently apt in these troubled times. The inclusion of his work for MUJI and others, however, is included not as a monument, but instead as a point of reference for Hara's exploration of design as a philosophy of living.
Because Designing Design is written more as a contemplation of the ethics of design than as a retrospective of the work of an individual graphic designer, it seems inappropriate to devote too much of any review to Harra's actual design work. That said, I would be remiss if I did not mention that Hara's designs are almost universally pleasing on a visceral level. Works like his proposal for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing demonstrate Hara's capacity for combining simplified line forms with the judicious use of white space to evoke Chinese calligraphy while simultaneously echoing the German efficiency of Otl Aicher's pictograms for the Munich Olympics. As befits a book that straddles both industrial and graphic design, however, Hara's most compelling projects are those where graphics, paper and signage break into three dimensions. His work for the Umeda Hospital of pediatrics and obstetrics typifies this success. Using white cloth and fabric for signage, he uses the delicacy of fabric and paper as subliminal cues for the cleanliness of the building. Even in such trivial details, Hara is able to subconsciously convey to patients that the sheets must be sterile because even the wall signs are spotless.
The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to examining the projects of others through exhibitions, contests, and even the works of his students. All of these subjects serve to advance his central thesis that to engage in the act of design our man-made environment must also be examined, felt and understood. Kaoru Mende's matches, for example, directly reference their environmental precursors, with a phosphorescent head applied directly on top of a twig. While few of these projects are likely to provide any direct benefit to our wracked environment, they do stand ably as a sort of product design couture, not necessarily to be worn or used, but certainly provoking thought and examination on the part of their users. To naive Western eyes, like my own, Hara's introspective and holistic approach to design thinking (as well as his work) seems nearly impossible to talk about without resorting to cliched terms like Zen.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (6)
As William McDonough and Michael Braungart so ably pointed out in their book Cradle to Cradle, the problem of sustainability goes way beyond paper versus plastic. Since we have progressed past the days where artisans created tables from scratch (sometimes chopping down the wood for him or herself), every product now contains a vast and interconnected lineage of effort, energy and material. Thus, even analyzing seemingly simple environmental questions is now a tremendously complex mathematical maximization problem, dependent on a variety of variables, including the cost of fuel, the environmental impact of mining, growing and shipping the materials that are used, and the legacy left by materials as they degrade (or fail to do so) in landfills and the like. Books like Industrial Ecology or Design for the Real World serve to demonstrate just how interconnected our global economy has become, and this makes the prospect of dubbing an item "green" all the more difficult. Sure it makes sense to use bamboo rather than wood because it grows so much faster, but if it's shipped from Thailand, the gains may not be worth the cost in freight.
Consequently, young architects or designers looking to promote a "green" or eco-friendly agenda are flummoxed by an overly large toolbox. So many new technologies promise to allow humans to live harmoniously in their environment that it has become difficult to devise a single sensible solution. Instead, architectural contests, such as the 1st Advanced Architecture Contest offered by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and showcased in their book Self-Sufficient Housing display a range of paradigm breaking, but widely divergent "solutions" to this problem, that seem far more at ease promoting the visible aspects of sustainability than delving into the deepest layers of our economy to find true efficiencies.
Every page of the book contains propositions and display materials for innovative housing solutions that attempt to tackle this problem. Almost universally, the renderings and conceptions are lovely to the point of fantastic, but the complexity of the underlying architecture warrants more than a page of description. In some sections the accompanying language read clearly and rang of hope, such as "we should stand for a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciably instead of dictatorially." Sadly, however, others were hampered with awkward language, unsupported statements, and the equivalent of buzzword bingo, where I found myself awaiting the next project that deemed itself an "urban parasite" or promised "modular," "passive," "flexible" or "adaptive" surfaces without ever explaining the mechanics behind them.
While the language and the explanations behind many of the products were jarring and awkward, they are not worthy of rebuke. More importantly the difficult verbiage was likely a consequence of the disparate origins of the proposals, coming from 6 continents, a multitude of countries and a total of 529 applicants. The global scale of concern for our environment and the vibrant ideas generated by our youth serve as the book's strongest points and reinforce just how important it has become to the younger generations to hold stewardship over our earth.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (0)
At a meager six inches tall by four inches wide, the petite Everyday Engineering doesn't seem to be the most likely candidate to stand out in a bookshelf, but its innovative spine captivates. As is done through the photographs inside, Andrew Burroughs has cut away the side of the book to reveal the construction of the binding. A combination of bundles of brightly colored paper, glue and string, the exposed guts of the book make for a compelling contrast in a sea of bland jacket design where the only other three-dimensionality usually comes from raised type.
Burroughs is an engineer who has worked for IDEO for the last 15 years and currently leads their Chicago office. Everyday Engineering is subtitled "How Engineers See," and Burroughs makes no apologies to designers for his engineering sensibilities. Everyday Engineering contains very little text, instead relying on nearly two-hundred pictures of design details submitted by IDEO employees that explain the hidden world that design details can communicate and laypeople often miss. In a section called "Unseen," for example, a photo of a mundane fire-hydrant perplexes, until paired with the opposite page, which shows uninstalled fire-hydrants on a construction site. In contrast to their usual orientation, these hydrants are jarringly piled sideways, and surprisingly sprout seven feet of straight black tubing from their bases -- a part that's usually buried for few dogs ever to see.
Every photo is interesting in its own way, although some held mysteries too deep for me to discover without peeking in the index for an explanation. There's little doubt, however, that most are photographs that only an engineer could love. Though individual pictures are beautiful, many of the photos within are strikingly unattractive, and not just the one in the section entitled "Ugliness." In some, gaudy colors pop off of the page, while others seem underexposed, dull or out of focus. Composition usually places the subject matter in the dead center of the page, and on top of all that, most of the objects photographed were aesthetically unappealing to begin with. Everyday Engineering does not presage the next Walker Evans of design photography, nor does it mean to. While a few of the pictures can be read as abstract art (particularly those of broken and randomly decaying objects), the overall impression is of quick snapshots taken at the very moment that the little details of the world pass by its lens.
For the primary pages the photos are full bleed and butted next to each other for maximum size. Because the photos were not carefully chosen by an art director, they stand in stark contrast to one another. Their visual disagreement forces the viewer to assess the content of the photo rather than the layout of the page. For all of that and more, I applaud Andrew Burroughs for taking the effort to show the tiny world of design details. In a world of overly pretty coffee table books, this one takes the opposite tack and rewards the reader for following along.
As anyone walking down Canal Street can attest, logos have both meaning and value. Somehow plastering two intertwined "G"s or an upside down black triangle on the side of a mundane bag can vault its price into the stratosphere. People accord a great deal of value to logos and brands, though as much of that worth is emotional as financial. Carolyn Davidson's Swoosh logo is now so pervasive that the name "Nike" is superfluous in its presence. Yet at the time she crafted it the three stripes of Adidas were far more evocative of running than her design. Even CEO Phil Knight was reportedly ambivalent about her stylized wing. Now, a once unrecognizable set of curves has become an asset for Nike to manage, just as carefully as a factory or a bank account.
Since corporate value and image are commingled with branding, it's virtually impossible to assess whether Nike would still be "Nike" if it had used a more literal representation of the goddess's wing instead. Capsule's Logos 01: an essential primer for today's competitive market tackles the many facets of this chicken and egg problem in its pretty pages. Since we're inundated with logos and branding on a daily basis, a book filled with more of them may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I felt that upon reading Capsule's book I had been provided with an insider's view of the thinking that goes into the iconography we see on a day to day basis.
The early sections of Logos address broad issues in logo design, such as: Planning, Creation, and Implementation. Each section is further divided into a variety of chapters that highlight issues and questions that logo designers may face, such as "How to Mange Your Research" or "Colors and Clients." These chapters can stand alone as essays or be absorbed in succession so that they add up to a cohesive whole. Each chapter is eminently readable and largely free of industry or typographic jargon.
Most of those chapters include sidebars and pictures of a variety of logos and case studies that provide support for their argument. Consequently, inclusion of a section called "Case Studies" at first seems surprising, since any reader who has examined the early portions of the text will feel as though he or she has been exposed to a lot of logos already. The case studies, however, are by far the most interesting part of the book. In the case studies, we finally get to see what designers call process. This section includes graphics of ideation, historical evolution, and the many logos that didn't make the cut. For a designer, the process is fascinating because the failures illustrate the thinking behind the design better than the crisp and perfect finished product ever can. I wished for more depth in this section, along with the inclusion of total misses and napkin sketches. With a book as polished as this one, I understand the urge to cut away all the rough edges, but I certainly miss them.
The debate between excess and minimalism in architecture will likely continue in the same sinusoidal pattern as the rising and falling of hemlines in fashion. While economists have precisely tied the lengths of hemlines of skirts with the economy, the fluctuations of architectural ornamentation take place over far greater spans of time. Perhaps this is because the construction of architectural projects can be measured in years while the demands of fashion fluctuate from season to season.
Alternatively, deeper forces may be at work. Recent work in evolutionary psychology dictates that human beings are swayed by a desire to fit in, but those who rebel in the opposite direction often become the most successful. This dichotomy can be seen in the rugged fashion of punk's opposition to repressive governments, the backlash of the hippie movement from the cookie-cutter fifties, and even in the haphazard grunge look that grew in stark contrast to glam rock and hair metal. Though purists like Adolf Loos or John Pawson might disagree, seemingly fickle changes in design movements may have as much to do with the culture that preceded them as they are a manifestation of the times themselves. Modern architecture would have little sway without the precedents of Antoni Gaudi or the Baroque movement.
In their book The Function of Ornament, Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo attempt to explain the paradox of the seemingly purposeless vestiges people emblazon on top of "functional" architecture. After a short introduction tracing the popularity of ornament from the Romans to the modernists, Moussavi and Kubo jump right into examples. While an exploration of the antecedents of modernism (and by association, their logical successors in "modern" ornament) could warrant a whole book, the philosophizing is kept to a minimum in favor of graphic examples of buildings which occasionally manage to make ornament functional.
Setting aside the inherent dialectic, a common theme across all projects is a sense of order, often achieved by repetition or by symmetry. Occasionally, the organizatiton even veers into the fractal -- the natural placement of compounded numbers seen repeatedly in the physical world -- such as the Serpentine Pavilion designed by Toyo Ito in London, where crisscrossing lines form triangles out of varying or seemingly random spaces, or the Dominus Winery by Herzog & de Meuron in the Napa Valley, where different sizes of natural rocks together cascade into seemingly random particles while betraying an underlying order.
The Function of Ornament goes beyond simply finding commonalities, and the authors' efforts at categorization are admirable. The book groups architectural projects into four broad sections: Form, Structure, Screen, and Surface, and provides examples of each. The authors supply notes and snippets detailing the construction of each work, but for the most part, they let the works express themselves.
