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The Book of Trees

Review by Rebecca Kohn In the preface to The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, author Manuel Lima says that he “could never find a wide-ranging book dedicated to the tree as one of the most popular, captivating, and widespread visual archetypes,” citing this as his motivation to create this book.

Out of the Blue

Review by Paul A. Ranogajec Everything that may be conjured in your mind by the phrase “Finnish design” is likely to be represented one way or another in Out of the Blue, a collection of biographical vignettes and interviews by Marko Ahtisaari and Laura Houseley.

Type on Screen: 5 Questions with the Author

As a design educator, I find that there is a constant uphill battle to get students an ever increasing amount of information in a continually shrinking amount of time.

Philip Grushkin: A Designer’s Archive

Review by Sophia Angelis Philip Grushkin, the long-forgotten but latterly-celebrated book jacket designer, was born to Jewish-Russian immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, in 1921. Trained at the Cooper Union, Grushkin studied calligraphy and lettering under the great George Salter before going on to design jackets for many of New York’s leading publishing houses.

Critiqued: 5 Questions with the Author

When fellow Designers Review of Books author Christina Beard contacted me about her new book I was of course very interested to see what one of our own had come up with.

Confessions of a Generalist

Thoughtfully designed, and encased in a conceptual cover that exhibits the interwoven intricacies of human involvement and existence, _Confessions of a Generalist _is an all-encompassing tale of the magnificent life and times of the renowned American industrial designer, Niels Diffrient.