Core77

"As advertised, Le Corbusier Le Grande weighs in at a whopping 20 plus pounds and measures 19.6 by 14.3 by 3.9 inches with over 600 pages. It stands (or lays) as a comprehensive archive of the work of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, otherwise known as Le Corbusier and arguably one of the most important modernist architects of the twentieth century."

"But the truth is far more complex, and the days and hours of work and sketching they put in comes through in the volume of photographs within. In their work and their success, these two brothers amply illustrate that the old aphorism that luck is when preparation meets timing."

"In any problem this large and complex, there are no easy answers, and Bottlemania should leave most readers with as many questions as answers. I would also hope, however, that readers realize that the problems it poses are far more universal than just fixating on Nestle's Poland Spring, Coke's Dasani, or Pepsi's Aquafina....Perhaps this summer a few of us should give reality a page-turning try."

Decoding Design addresses shape and form numerically, but it also does a lot more, and that's why, as someone who does know something about number theory (as opposed to numerology), Maggie Macnab's book is both wonderfully fascinating and endlessly frustrating.

By presenting both uber-consumers and the professionals who deal with trying to sell us the stuff to fill our endless appetites, or the holes in our souls, Walker indirectly addresses what he coins the "pretty good" problem: What distinguishes a product when assembly lines or underpaid third-world workers can make even the cheapest products "pretty good?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Contests 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.

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.

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.

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.

Whether due to its iconoclastic founding, its multicultural "melting pot" constituency or its extraordinarily protective intellectual property rights, popular wisdom has always held America to be a nexus of innovation. The serial entrepreneur has always had a place to flourish here, from Edison's Menlo Park to Sergey Brin and Larry Page's Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Fukasawa himself opens the book with an introduction that talks through page fifteen, not about the author, not about the objects, but about people. The photographs in Fukasawa's introduction are all in hard-focus. No light-boxes here. Instead, the introduction is crammed with pictures of human behavior in man-made environments gone wrong.

It is often cited, however, that nonverbal communication makes up the bulk of information flow between individuals, and the perplexing popularity of emoticons provides ample testimony that words aren't always enough to get the point across. For creative teams, these adages hold even more fully.

Aluminum foam, heat sensitive compounds and color changing fabrics are all included, with details on the manufacturers, including addresses, websites and phone contacts. While I cannot guarantee that simply knowing the name of the manufacturer will provide entree into purchasing novel technologies like LiTraCon transparent concrete (that's TRANSPARENT CONCRETE folks), it certainly is a step in the right direction.

Ultimately, like the Internet, The Internet Imaginaire covers too much territory to digest in a single sitting, yet alone a few hundred words of review. By the final page, I had to agree with Flichy that the current manifestation of the Internet didn't necessarily live up to the Utopian visions present at its founding, but what movement does?

As someone in the early phase of my design career I found a valuable lesson in virtually every chapter, and I suspect that Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design will become even more resonant later in my career when I'm given the opportunity to reflect back on the impact of my decisions and the philosophical implications of designing the surfaces of our modern world.

Hot-Wiring the Creative Process includes clear methodologies and examples of iterated approaches (yes, including brainstorming and flashcards for inspiration), but he also advocates exercises to keep creativity flowing, particularly tasks that are not related to the job at hand, but closer to a designer's personal passions.

Furnish collects the diverse output of designers spanning from avant-garde conceptualists like Maarten Baas to established architects like Zaha Hadid. The results range from whimsical to stunning.

By their own words, The Pentagram Papers are described as idiosyncratic explorations of "curious, entertaining, stimulating, provocative and occasionally controversial points of view that have come to the attention of, or in some cases are actually originated by, Pentagram." Truer words have rarely been spoken.

While designers have always needed to be jacks-of-all-trades, Kolko's book shows just how fuzzy the boundaries have become. Thus, although Thoughts on Interaction Design is not an industrial design book in the mold of Henry Dreyfuss or even Donald Norman, his Thoughts are just as important, because all industrial design is interaction design as well.

With the impending release of tools like Adobe CS3 and the relegation of once-modern dot matrix printers to art installations, the etymology of terms like leading may soon be forgotten; but just because we have these new digital tools doesn't give us license to forget the past. A collection of essays, articles, graphics and promotional materials, Made with FontFont is a virtual history of the digital typography revolution.

Mostert and Apolzon's book From Edison to iPod: Protect Your Ideas and Make Money ably explains the variety of legal mechanisms an aspiring creative can use to "protect" their intellectual property. For a layperson, the book serves as a quick overview of design patents, utility patents, copyright protection, and a variety of other modes of protection.

Innovators come in two varieties: those who toil away unappreciated in their laboratories for years before unveiling their masterpiece, and those who surround themselves with the smartest people that they can find. Gordon Bruce's monograph of Eliot Noyes demonstrates the joy and prosperity that the latter approach can provide.

For graphic designers interested in the history of visual iconography, Markus Rathgeb's monograph of Aicher's life proves a valuable resource, but it deserves a wider audience. Since designers don't have the opportunity to see their own career through the lens of a retrospective until its end, this elegant account of one designer's life provides ample lessons for those of us at the beginning.