From the category archives:

3D

Design is the Problem

Design is the Problem

Review by David Sherwin
“Would you like a paper or plastic bag for your groceries?”
Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? Paper should be a better choice, because it will biodegrade. Plastic will go on forever in landfills and choke our oceans.

Well, my answer isn’t very well informed. There are major trade-offs in the consumption, [...]

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Fully Booked: Cover Art & Design for Books

Fully Booked

Prepare for this review to become rather meta. Gestalten’s Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Books is a design book about book design also containing six essays, three apiece by Katherine Gillieson and Maria Fusco, one of which is an essay about the difficulty of producing a book on books. Phew.
As with all of [...]

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Daniel Eatock – Imprint

Daniel Eatock - Imprint

I have been wanting to write the review of Daniel Eatock’s book, Imprint, (Amazon: US | CA| UK | DE) for some time. It has lain on my desk for weeks and I have delved into it over an over, but the truth is that I have struggled to really work out how to describe [...]

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Camoupedia

Camoupedia

Review by Daniel Gray
Within minutes of picking up Roy R. Behren’s Camoupedia (Amazon link), I was regurgitating fascinating bits of camouflage-related trivia at anyone who would listen, like some kind of third-rate Stephen Fry. Did you know that in 1918, Walt Disney drove an ambulance for the Red Cross, covered not with a standard camouflage [...]

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The Designful Company

The Designful Company

Review by David Sherwin
“If you wanna innovate, you gotta design. – Marty Neumeier
From the airy confines of interior design to the tailored minutae of the type designer, the varied disciplines of our profession continue to rush outwards like galaxies fleeing the Big Bang. And the force that drives our profession’s expansion? The universal process we [...]

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The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

(Guest review by Becky Quintal)
‘You only have to see his notes to feel the emotion of the speaker. It is evident that this kind of discourse, even if expressed only in the intimacy of his notebook on the train, reveals a therapeutic aspect of the lecture for someone like Le Corbusier. His life was a [...]

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Designing For People

Designing for People

Guest review by Phillip Hunter
“Design is a silent salesman… contributing not just increased efficiency… but also assurance and confidence.”
So asserts American Industrial Designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904 – 1972) near the beginning of his 1955 memoir, Designing for People (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE). Those characteristics emerge again and again throughout the anecdotes and explanations filling the book. It’s [...]

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UPPERCASE Magazine

uppercase magazine

I am cheating here because UPPERCASE is a magazine and not a book, but rules are made to be broken. How could a web site that bills tags itself with “books for the creative mind” turn down a review of the first issue of a magazine that bills itself as a “magazine for the creative [...]

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Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything.

Cars

The car sums up the contradictions of industrialised age more than any other design object. Simultaneously a symbol of desire, design and engineering brilliance and of over-consumption of resources and destruction of the environment.
The subtitle to Stephen Bayley’s Cars (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) comes from Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. “Cars mean more to these [...]

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Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

Thumbnail image for Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

(Guest Review by David Sherwin
Underwhelmed.
We’ve all had this reaction when encountering a product or service that just didn’t cut it.
Take, for example, the alarm clock next to my bed. There are two alarm switches side by side: one for me, and one for my wife. Invariably, every morning I hit the wrong switch and the [...]

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