Double review of Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams and Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible

Review by Carolina de Bartolo

“To design is to think.” —Dieter Rams, Industrial Designer (b. 1932–, Weisbaden, Germany)

What can I tell you about Dieter Rams that you don’t already know? Since one of his many famed mottoes regarding good design is “less but better,” if I was to tell you too much or to tell you something about him you already know, my words might embody the very weakness in design that Rams warns us against.

“I was lucky that I began at the right moment and that I stopped also at the right moment.” —Dieter Rams

For example, I’d probably already be saying more than necessary if I told you that: 1) Rams is one of the most influential industrial designers of the late 20th century who; 2) developed products that were and are used daily by millions of people; and 3) was the lead designer at Braun for nearly 40 years ¹ where he designed everything from coffee makers and juicers to alarm clocks, calculators, speakers and record players. I’d also likely be telling you something you already know if I mentioned that his credo “10 Principles for Good Design” is an exemplary manifesto.

“Very good design, however, does not evolve only by ticking those ten boxes. From a good ordinary design there should always be the possibility for an outstanding, self-explanatory design to arise. It very seldom happens.” —Dieter Rams

(Image: Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams, Gestalten)

However, I might be explaining things better if I was to offer a few lesser-known details such as: 1) he was the first to design a clear plexiglass cover on a record player ², a design feature that was widely copied by competitors and thus became the norm; and 2) his 1960s designs for Braun’s audio equipment heavily influenced Apple’s long-time lead designer, Jonathan Ive; and 3) in 1959 he designed the first portable record player, the precursor to the Walkman and then, of course, the iPod; and 4) his Universal Shelving System for Vitsoe+Zapf, an interchangeable modular storage unit conceived and designed in the 1960s, is still in production today.

When a designer originates things we take for granted as having always been that way, when he makes things that are in continuous use for decades and when his influence can be seen and felt for generations afterward, it is clear that individual is practicing the profession at its highest level. No matter what kind of design you engage in ³, Rams offers you guidance, through his designs themselves and through his philosophy of design.

Suffice it to say Rams is sublime.

So it pleases me that a couple impressive tomes of his work have recently been published. The first of these is Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams edited by Klaus Kemp and Keiko Ueki-Polet and published by Gestalten (Amazon: US|DE|UK). This is the catalog for the exhibition “Less and More,” a retrospective of Rams’s work that originated at the Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan in 2008 and has travelled to Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and is currently at the San Francisco MOMA. Filling the catalog’s 808 pages are countless closeup full-color photos and essays in both German and English. The majority of the photos are printed on a matte-coated stock and the text-only pages are printed on a creamy uncoated wafer-thin bible paper. The book is as thick and flexible as a phone book, but its page size is smaller and more square. It is covered in white vinyl and, thankfully, it is housed in a chipboard slipcase that allows it to stand up properly on a shelf. Rams has said he was always interested in the mixture of materials and this particular artifact seems to have taken a cue from that notion.

Just a few months ago, Phaidon published a 400-page monograph Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible (Amazon: US|UK|DE) by Sophie Lovell with a foreword by Jonathan Ive. As an artifact, it is a more traditional book than the Gestalten title, slightly larger, casebound in white with a thermographically-printed textured dust jacket reminiscent of the dotted mesh Rams so skillfully employed on his product designs. Inside it is also is printed on two kinds of paper stock, an uncoated cream sheet for the text-only pages and a matte-coated sheet of similar heft for the innumerable full-color photos.

These books are picture books, as they should be. However, both have substantial textual matter, some of which is rather similar in content. Both offer much historical context, recounting the history of Braun and the cultural forces, events and personalities surrounding its founding. They both also offer a biography of Rams himself, detailing the influence of his grandfather’s woodworking, his education as an architect, his pre-Braun employment as an interior designer.

(Image: Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams, Gestalten)

From Gestalten’s Less and More:

“For 40 years Dieter Rams led the Braun design team, always seeking out the ultimate unification, the harmonization between interior and exterior. The Braun design process is the process of pursuing an ideal relationship, a resonance between the internal and the external. … If one is won over by the design of Rams and Braun, it is clear that it is not due to an aura emanating from the material. Its strength lies in the design itself.”

(Image: Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible, Phaidon)

From Phaidon’s As Little Design as Possible:

“Through his grandfather, Rams developed a lifelong love of honest, simple handmade wooden furniture. ‘My grandfather had no machines. He rejected them. He preferred working alone. … He took great care in selecting the wood he used and shaped and planed it by hand. … Needless to say, back then I did not register this consciously, but I adopted it and even today have not given it up. I was always concerned that things should be plain, straightforward. For as long as I can remember that was what I wanted.’”

Both books also stress the collaborative relationship of designer and engineer that Rams so fully embraced.

(Image: Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams, Gestalten)

“Dieter Rams always clearly distanced himself from the status of an artist and the attendant mindset, preferring to present himself as a ‘design engineer.’ No doubt strategic considerations prompted this, namely the desire to establish that his status was on a par with the technical engineers at Braun and maintain it over a long period of time. In doing so, he actually enabled the birth of a design culture in an otherwise technology-focused company.”

– from Less and More

(Image: Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible, Phaidon)

“Although the media often tends to conflate ‘Braun design’ with ‘Dieter Rams design,’ Rams himself always points out that the appliances created during his time there were the result of teamwork. When authorship is assigned to a particular product it is important to bear this collaborative design approach in mind. … Rams would be the first to say that what constitutes his ‘work’ as an industrial designer is inseparable from the systems and networks through which it was produced.”

– from As Little Design as Possible

The Gestalten title contains a number of essays by various authors, including ones by Sophie Lovell, Klaus Kemp and Friedrich Friedl as well as some brief words from Rams himself:

“We wanted to make products whose appearance did not immediately command attention but instead became more appealing through use and an enduring aesthetic.”

The Phaidon title has a foreword by Jonathan Ive and ends with an interesting Klaus Kemp essay on Rams’s Legacy:

“Allowing emotional and visual stimuli and the allure of novelty to override any system of ethical values demonstrates, for him, extreme irresponsibility towards the future of the environment and design, not to mention the user. ‘In my experience, things which are designed to be different simply to be different are seldom better,’ he said … in 1993, ‘but that which is better is almost always different.’”

(Image: Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible, Phaidon)

If you are something of a minimalist like me, you might prefer the sturdy and simple production values of the Phaidon title over the unusualness and unconventionality of the Gestalten one. On the other hand, if you are like me in that you often find solace in Dieter Rams’s work and his aphoristic musings on design, you might just like to have them both!

“Be brave, despite everything!” —Dieter Rams

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams edited by Klaus Klemp and Keiko Ueki-Polet is published by Gestalten. ISBN: 9783899552775.

As Little Design As Possible: The Work of Dieter Rams by Sophie Lovell is published by Phaidon. ISBN: 9780714849188

About the Reviewer

Carolina de Bartolo is a graphic designer and a professor of typography and design history as well as the author of Explorations in Typography: Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting (A Visual Textbook for Intermediate to Advanced Typography), which we reviewed back in May.

Footnotes

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Having only recently been exposed to the work of Alvin Lustig I was very excited to learn of the publication of the monograph Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig chronicling his life as a designer, teacher and author. I was only aware of some of his earlier experimentations with printers’ ornaments, but I was already extremely interested. I had high hopes of learning much more about the work, the man behind it, and the environment in which it was created.

The book did not disappoint.

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Written by Steven Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen, the book details the many aspects of the life of Alvin Lustig including his work in both graphic and interior design, how he evolved as a designer, his interest in education and his passion for changing the world through his creations. The breadth of his understanding of design covered many mediums and from the very beginning of the book you begin to understand that every aspect of his career was intertwined.

If the heights of professional practice are measured on total output and sheer innovation, then Lustig reached the zenith, even in his short lifetime. The prodigious cross-disciplinary work he produced—from book jackets to a helicopter design, textiles, furniture, magazines, logos, trademarks, sign systems, advertisements, and office and home interiors—equaled the output of others who lived for twenty, thirty, and even forty years longer.

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The book openly states that the seminal work of Lustig’s career was the line of book covers he created for New Directions. However, the book is not limited to, or even seem to place a higher importance on, that portion of his career. The roughly 200 pages inside are lusciously illustrated with a great deal of work from his entire life. It is neatly organized into five sections, each focusing on a different period of his life and career. The sections, in order, cover his early career, his print work, his three-dimensional work, his work as a teacher, and his writings.

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You get a great sense of how much his professional life mixed with his personal life and throughout the book there are in-depth insights into many aspects of the personal relationships he held. The book is co-authored by Elaine Lustig Cohen, who was his wife from early on in his career until he died an early death after developing Kimmelstiel-Wilson syndrome, an incurable kidney disease related to diabetes. There are no details spared and the emotion of the latter portion of his career are evident in the inclusion of the fact that he continued to work even after he had gone blind.

In an undated letter to a friend he wrote, “to be rather blunt I have not been able to see at all since the first of October. Starting around the end of June…the good left eye began to grow foggy and daily grew dimmer until now I can only distinguish dark from light…Only one or two people were aware of the situation and I was doing some rather fancy faking to carry on.”

The consistent interjection of the details of his personal life provide great insight into his approach as a designer, as well as his philosophy of the role a designer should play in society.

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I will admit that at first I was daunted by the overall size of the book, it seemed very much like a textbook and I am not interested in reading textbooks. I have read plenty in my life already. I was pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the book layout and the pacing of the writing. The page layout changes quite often in order to accomodate for, and compliment, the large number of illustrations of work presented. The text is nicely laid out and the writing of Steven Heller borders on a conversation. It turned out to be a quick read and I finished it in two days. I have already mentioned it several times, but I want to mention once more how nice the amount of work within the book is, the great number of illustrations help visually tell the story being presented. I went in with little knowledge of Alvin Lustig and came out with the understanding of just how expansive his short career really was. The addition of the insight of his personal life rounded the book out perfectly.

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If I had any complaint to make about the book it would be that the cover and binding left something to be desired. I am not usually of the opinion that the dusk jacket is more beautiful than the actual book cover, but in this case it definitely is. That small nuance aside, this book was the perfect combination of the history, lifestyle and visual work of Alvin Lustig. I am already on the lookout for other monographs of this quality.

Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig is published by Chronicle Books and is available from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE).

About the Reviewer
Dominic Flask is a designer by nature, a teacher by application and a thoughtful companion by friendship. You can find his work here, his thoughts here, and his passion on Design is History.

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I came across this slim book (which is more an extended essay) while looking into texts on aesthetics. I was particularly interested in books about the differences in perception. Not specifically from a design point of view but more general ideas on cultural differences in the perception of everyday objects, the spaces we occupy and how we interact with them.

I call this book an essay – I could easily call it a mild rant. A personal plea against homogeneity. In Praise of Shadows (Amazon UK US) concerns itself with the difference in attitudes regarding light, and how western influence has diluted the Japanese love of shadows.

Originally published in 1933 in Japanese, the English translation was published in 1977 and as the title hints at Jun’ichirō Tanizaki makes the claim that traditional Japanese objects such as lacquerware and the Japanese home itself have been made specifically for low light, or to be specific, the light produced as the day closes – for example the central living space in a traditional Japanese dwelling would always have a sand or neutral finish, all the best to subtly highlight an evenings fading light.

Why should this propensity to seek beauty in darkness be so strong only in Orientals? The West too has known a time when there was no electricity, gas, or petroleum, yest so far as I know the West has never been disposed to delight in shadows. Japanese ghosts have traditionally no feet; Western ghosts have feet, but are transparent. As even this trifle suggests, pitch darkness has always occupied our fantasies, while in the West even ghosts are clear as glass. This is true too of our household implements: we prefer colours compounded of darkness, they prefer the colours of sunlight. And of silverware and copperware: we love them for the burnish and patina, which they consider unclean, insanitary, and polish to a glittering brilliance. They paint their ceilings and walls in pale colours to drive out as many of the shadows as they can. We fill our gardens with dense plantings, they spread out a flat expanse of grass.

Tanizaki argues that the West is quite opposite to the Japanese: the West emphasize brightness and uniformity. Tanizaki believes that western culture associate brightness with cleanliness and hygiene. In modern western architecture light is a premium. Buildings are designed to be as bright as possible, no matter what the time of day. Shadows, dim corners, nooks and crannies are reduced. By contrast Japanese architecture regards light in a much more subtle fashion; light is seen as liquid and as having different properties depending on the time of day and season. Tanizaki believes that in Japanese culture shadows and low light are intrinsic to how their homes have evolved. Japanese homes filter and diffuse light through paper walls, letting it absorb onto neutral surfaces, reflecting the change in light throughout the day. This concept of varying light is not alien to western architects but Tanizaki’s bugbear is of western hegemony and to address this he needs to generalize.

An example of a Japanese interior he uses early in the book, and one that made me smile, is of the water closet. Tanizaki bemoans the loss of the traditional Japanese toilet – the western equivalent is made up of shiny metal faucets, highly reflective tiles or surfaces invariably white. The Japanese closet according to Tanizaki is a place of spiritual reflection:

“Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, ‘a physiological delight’ he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.”

In Praise of Shadows jumps around from subject to subject with no apparent rhyme or reason – for such a slim book there is a fair amount of repetition, but this only adds to the character of the text, and the slightly chaotic feel seems to reflect the personal and singular attitude that Tanizaki takes with his subject matter.

The passage regarding skin colour was also quite revealing, discussing as it does the Japanese tradition of teeth blackening combined with green lipstick. Of course teeth blackening is not just a Japanese tradition and why this was seen as attractive or desirable in Japanese culture is never explained by Tanizaki. His explanation of why Japanese culture has such respect of the days changing light seems to be one of not surrendering to progress and the respect of tradition – I came away from this book thinking that Tanizaki had created a swansong to a disappearing culture – whether that is what he intended I can only presume, but the Japan he wistfully talks about probably does not now exist apart from in a few rural areas. I have never visited Japan, but I wonder what would Tanizaki think about my perception of the modern Japan, a perception gleaned from people I have met, movies, books, magazines, the internet and the TV: modern, technologically advanced, clean, bright – and neon.

So why would this book interest the designer? Maybe this book can serve as a reminder of how differently we view and use spaces and ‘things’ depending on our cultural background; that design decisions will always be fundamentally subjective no matter what the logic or rational that underpins them. Maybe it is a reminder to keep one eye on the passage of time and that ‘good’ design can be timeless.

About the Reviewer

Owen Priestley is a contributor to the arts, culture and politics blog www.20three.com.
Owen is the Senior Art Director at Brighton digital agency Kerb.
Follow Owen on Twitter – http://twitter.com/owen20three

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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, production (and related pollution), and recycling opportunities for every seemingly simple decision that we make throughout our lives, both as consumers and as designers.

And this is the crux of Nathan Shedroff’s useful book, Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable (Amazon: US|UK). Within its pages sits a fully realized schema of the minutia that working designers and students need to internalize in order to start making more educated decisions regarding the sustainability of their client and personal projects. Being mindful about sustainability—both in the products and services we design, and in the decisions we make as consumers and creators in an ever-evolving economy—can be an astoundingly complex and time-consuming undertaking.

Commenting on the paper vs. plastic debate, Shedroff says:

“One has to be better than the other, right? This is one of the problems with sustainability. The issues are so complex and interconnected that even the experts are having difficulty coming to conclusions. Customers simply want to know which is the better product to buy. Most are, overwhelmingly, interested in buying products that support their values. However, we can’t give them the information they desire because we don’t yet know it ourselves… There may be an even better answer, though. How about no bag? Or a reusable bag?”

This is one of the benefits of espousing a “systems thinking” mindset, which is critical to considering issues of sustainability. This mode of thinking allows us to disassemble the everyday assumptions that our clients provide us and consider every aspect of the design process in thorough, considered detail:

“Design that is about appearance, or margins, or offerings and market segments, and not about real people—their needs, abilities, desires, emotions, and so on—that’s the design that is the problem. The design that is about systems solutions, intent, appropriate and knowledgeable integration of people, planet, and profit, and the design that, above all, cares about customers as people and not merely consumers—that’s the design that can lead to healthy, sustainable solutions.”

Design Is the Problem is broken into multiple sections: an introduction to the concept of sustainability, a high-level primer for the reduction of material and resource use, reuse, recycling, restoring, and the processes we may take as designers to measure the impacts of our design decisions.

Over the course of the text, he also provides a guided tour through a wide range of sustainability frameworks that have been developed over past decades, such as Natural Capitalism, Cradle to Cradle, Biomimicry, Life Cycle Analysis, Social Return on Investment, and many others. He not only catalogues the strengths and weaknesses of each—with clear-eyed regard to how they consider address environmental, social, and financial issues—but he also shows how they overlap, and provides a summary framework that you can adapt for your own use.

These frameworks are useful as a way to structure your thinking about how you approach your everyday work and your client’s (often unarticulated) needs. They also help you balance the inevitable trade-offs you’ll have to make. Shedroff himself is quick to note, quite early in his book, that we should be careful not to aspire to an impossible ideal:

“You won’t ever create a perfect solution. Ever. You will have to be satisfied with creating better solutions along the way—each update, hopefully, better than the rest, and potentially no solution ever reaching your ideal vision of ‘how it should be done.’ Every design solution is a compromise of some kind, bowing to structural, financial, or environmental realities, and conforming to customer, market, or client desires. That’s the nature of design. If you’re creating real solutions for real people, the market will probably not yet be ready for the ultimate solution you envision.”

Shedroff is careful to discuss the best- and worst-case tradeoffs with each design specification choice that you make. In a section about substitution, he notes that the use of PVC should be avoided whenever possible—but also acknowledges that if it can’t be replaced with a non-plastic material, there are a range of other plastics that, while not recyclable, will have a lower impact.

Where this book really shines is in the eloquence of its language, its fluid ease in itemizing the thorny details of everything from production methods to societal trends invented by corporations such as planned obsolescence and retail therapy, and the case studies illustrating most sections. (I appreciated the one about Apple’s invisible commitment to reducing materials use in practically every single design they make.) There is an immense amount of data jam-packed into this volume.

Where this book stumbles a little, for me, is in how Shedroff’s discussions of making meaning—the subject of a whole other book that he’s written—is woven through the narrative. As I was reading through the text, paragraphs such as these would often pop out:

“…products that are meaningful (that resonate with our values, emotions, and meanings) are often the most satisfying and durable of all. To whatever extent you can develop products and services that connect deeply with customers, the likelihood that your customers will keep these products longer increases dramatically.”

Perhaps Shedroff is worried that we may place sustainability considerations at a fixed point in the design process, as opposed to grounding every design that we make in more holistic considerations regarding the impact of every design decision throughout the entire process (including our client’s business strategies). The sustainability discussion definitely lives at the highest levels of our consideration, including the maximization of usability, meaning, and accessibility in products and services that we create, both online and offline. He notes this in this book.

However, there was some intriguing debate at the Interaction 10 conference after Nathan’s keynote speech, in which he spent a great deal of energy talking about creating meaning for people through our design efforts, how this was possible through the adept manipulation that we can exercise thoughtfully via our design skills, and that concerns of sustainability should be reflected in these meaning-making decisions. In doing so, we can hopefully create a culture where consumption is reduced and our resources are used more effectively. “Those who engage the world in meaningful ways don’t look to products and services so much to satisfy their core meanings,” he says in this book.

This tension between the actions of the designer and the never-ending flow of our culture creates a sort of circular, “cart before the horse” argument that provides an interesting tension through these pages. Design can influence how our culture considers the value of sustainability—embedded in the products and services that swirl around us—but our consumption-focused, marketing-centric culture will also need to (de)volve to allow that shift.

So, who’s going to act first to effect this change: the designer, the marketer, or the consumer? Shedroff says we are, and by transcending our stated client problems and think about the (often outdated) systems they persist within:

“…the last think our clients and companies want to hear when they engage us is that ‘we need to back up here and examine whether the whole system needs to be readdressed’ or ‘this is really a cultural issue, and it’s not solvable by simply making a new product.’”

Yet this is exactly what we should be working towards as designers: thinking beyond artifacts, and into the ways that our culture functions as an complex, interconnected system. However, working to make more sustainable design decisions requires you to set boundaries or interests to frame your sustainability argument; otherwise, you could spend forever tracing the interconnections between various issues within a system that you want to influence. Part of being successful in making decisions regarding sustainability is in broad awareness of the potential issues and judicious research in the areas of deepest impact.

The end of the book covers the actual production and marketing of your product or service. How do you go just far enough down the rabbit hole in considering these issues for your clients? How do you properly market and advertise these more sustainable products and services? Measure their impact? The final sections of the book consider these questions.

Reading through this from cover to cover, a layperson or student designer may not be able to grasp how all of this data can be applied to your daily, professional practice. Shedroff provides plenty of frameworks, such as this one, which seems more useful for larger-scale design organizations and corporations to adapt for their use:

The “super summary” in the book’s appendix is a great checklist that designers can begin using right away as a punch-list.

I definitely think this book is worth owning, either as a (DRM-free) PDF or as an (ulp) tangible book on your bookshelf. It’s a strong starting point regarding the subject of sustainability for any design professional, providing an initial frame for you to structure your thinking regarding this immensely complex subject.

For those who are currently responsible for planning, researching, and crafting tangible products or services, this book will prove as an invaluable desk reference on how to incorporate systems thinking and considerations of sustainability into their project’s business processes. I know that I will be pulling this book down frequently from my (virtual) bookshelf for many years to come.

(As a side note: A good nonfiction book to read alongside Shedroff’s book is The World without Us by Alan Weisman, which helps to visualize many of the sustainability issues included in Design Is the Problem—and in a manner that may hit home more strongly on a gut level.)

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable is available from Rosenfeld Media as a physical book or digital (PDF) edition. Use the code DROB for a 15% discount. You can also order it from Amazon US and Amazon UK or The Designer’s Review of Books Amazon store (which helps us keep the site running).

All review images used under CC licence from Rosenfeld Media and available on Flickr

About the Reviewer

David Sherwin is a Senior Interaction Designer at frog design in Seattle, WA. He maintains the blog ChangeOrder: Business + Process of Design. His first book, Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills, will be out in November 2010 from HOW Design Press.

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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 Gestalten’s output, Fully Booked is a well-produced, finely printed and sturdy affair – regardless of the content, their publications never fail on the production front. The only oddity is the rather boring cover, which I can only put down to the difficulty of trying to outdo any of the examples within the book and retreating to the neutrality of cardboard and linen, the raw materials of a hardback. The odd cut of the linen providing a kind of visual gag of stripping away the outer clothing of a book.

The other quirk is that the book is printed with the end in the middle. One half of the book deals with the nature of books as an art object and explorations of the form of the book itself. Turn it around and the other half of the book is concerned with the design of book covers and layouts. Think of it as the book as art and the art of the book.

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Of the essays, I found Fusco’s more critically engaging in her analysis of the meaning of the book as an object, its role in the hands of artists and designers in contemporary culture, and her musings on the future of the book. Gillieson confines herself more to describing particular choices from the books included in the volume. It’s a good place to start if you want to jump to some of the highlights, but it tends to read more like a set of extended captions except for Limits of Design – The Book About Books, which muses on the problems of reproducing books within the same medium as the books themselves.

Having criticised Gillieson for this, it is hard to describe Fully Booked without picking out a few favourites myself. Some are conceptually clever or witty, such as Jason Salavon’s Field Guide to Style & Colour, which is a full-size replication of the 2007 IKEA catalogue reduced to layout and squares of colour or Vaughan Ward’s Dictionary of Fuck, which is less about its design than the intention to make the word fuck lose its strength through constant repetition. I think it’s more apt for it being the first word anyone looks up in a dictionary when they are a kid and it also reminded me of Victor Solomon’s marvelous Sopranos Uncensored edit.

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Others are ingenious technical or design solutions. The Best of Wim T. Schippers, “an artist who borders consistently on the irritating,” according to the caption, has the graphic design problem of how to best show the Dutch and English text resolved by printing them in red and green superimposed upon each other. Two colour transparency sheets were provided to filter out the unwanted language.

A few other books are “interactive” too, either requiring light (or lack of it) to show the text or some other kinds of physical interactions. I should give a nod to my colleague Stijn Ossevoort, who worked on the creation of Archäologie der Zukunft (The Archeology of the Future). The book has a thermochromatic surface that reacts to temperature and also reacts to movement and sound changing what the book displays on its cover.

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There is little point in my recounting any favourites further, you really need to see it to enjoy it and that’s both its strength and potential weakness. As Gillieson points out, you really want to get your hands on all the books that are pictured within. Seeing photos of books in a book doesn’t really do the experience of the original justice and now you are looking at photos on the web of a book containing photos of books. Like I said, meta.

Fully Booked is, however, an inspiring source and reference book that shows just how far a quite specific medium can be pushed and how constraints can be fuel for creativity. The book is not about to die anytime soon. Fusco, in her final essay The World of Tomorrow – The Future of Books, writes

“With the majority of data being conveyed digitally, the book is no longer burdened by the task of transporting information, which means it can now move on to new pastures.” She goes on to make the comparison to painting’s trajectory when photography displaced it as the visual recorder.”

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Given the death of the 12″ album cover and, these days, even the shrunken space of the CD cover, book design is one of the few areas of physical popular culture that designers can get their hands on. Although book covers are essentially packaging, they generally manage to provide a far more sensitive and creative canvas for designers and artists than packaging design offers. Like the poster, book design is still considered an art in itself. That is except for John Grisham and Dan Brown novels, but their aesthetically challenged cover designs simply goes to prove the old adage that you can judge a book by its cover.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Books is published by Gestalten. All images © Gestalten.

If you enjoyed this review, you can help support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying Fully Booked through Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or the Designer’s Review of Books Amazon store..

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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 it. Martin Soames does a good job in Eye magazine by using Eatock’s list-making obsessiveness to describe Eatock and the book itself, but he also barely scratches the surface of its complexity. (Incidentally, there is a good piece on Eatock in the current issue of Eye).

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Imprint is a collection of Eatock’s works spanning 1975–2007. Yet it is a book that could only have really existed in our age of networked, participatory media. There is a distinctly web and blogger feel to the collection of oddities grouped together by Eatock’s editorial eye. A large part of the content is made up of Thank You Photographs, a section of Eatock’s web site the exhibits pictures his readers have sent to him. These are more than just fan mail – the participants are executing the visual and editorial algorithms that Eatock has set up through his work. The results could happily be tagged and act in much the same way as a cleverly thought-out Flickr pool, but his collection of them somehow adds an editorial process that a database lacks.

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Opening with a long and entertaining interview with Eatock and interspersed with insightful captions, Imprint is a glimpse into a remarkable mind. Clearly Eatock is obsessive, whether listing ideas, facts, images or seeing an idea through to its extreme end, but there is such a sharp intelligence to the obsessiveness that it is hard not to be infected by it. No wonder the participatory projects do so well.

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Eatock studied at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication and later at the Royal College of Art, but has long harboured a desire to dematerialize the graphic process, “exploring objectivity, systems, and concepts, and remove as many aesthetic decisions from the design process as possible”. He describes his days a high school when a schoolmate, Daniel Forster, was making “amazing pen drawings on the beach”.

“I am competitive, and since I knew I could not compete with Dan’s drawing ability, I understood that to be happy, I had to invent a creative way around the problem of making things look beautiful. So while Dan was drawing perfect renderings of the beach, I drew two straight lines on a page, dividing it into thirds. I wrote ‘sky’ in the top third, ‘sea’ in the second, and ‘sand’ in the bottom third.

“I realized in that instance that the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea. This simple realization has changed the way I approach almost everything I make. If something does not come naturally, I search out an alternative way to respond to the problem.”

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Of course, the objectivity Eatock tries to bring into the work ends up carrying his signature way of seeing the world and it is this that makes his work so interesting. It is full of circularities (Eatock enjoys self-referential scenes and objects as well as drawing circles) and systems, inquiry and double-takes. Imprint is at times hilarious and others a confirmation that a simple idea, well-executed or, indeed, executed at all, has enormous potency. “My obsession,” he says, “is to find the sense in nonsense and nonsense in sense.”

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Despite the underlying schemes, lists and processes that drive his work (and life, it seems), there remains something slippery about Imprint. Its constant self-and cross-referencing works across its text, images and layout and I found myself continually flipping back and forth trying to grasp the big picture, but it remains infuriating just out of reach. Reading it is like surfing through StumbleUpon, but with a great deal more beauty. My guess is that Eatock has the whole thing somehow clearly stored in his quite remarkable brain – a human Google cache tracking visual relationships in the everyday world.

Despite being difficult to describe, Imprint makes so much sense when it is in your hands that it has become one of my favourite books of inspiration and reference.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Imprint is published by Princeton Architectural Press (look for the video of Eatock putting his thumbprint on every book spine). If you would like to support The Designer’s Review of Books you can buy it from Amazon (US | CA| UK | DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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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 design but with early Disney cartoons? Or that snipers in WWII would hide inside fake horse carcasses? How about the fact that there is a specific technique for painting sweet potatoes to render them virtually invisible?

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Before I got into it, I was half expecting a Jane’s Reference-like book, full to the brim with painstakingly catalogued military markings (something that the superglue-fingered Airfixkid in me would have treasured), but its scope is far broader than that. Encompassing everything from Picasso to the evolution of mice, this is an essential reference for anyone interested in the subject matter and its broader context.

“By far the most famous eyewitness account of modern camouflage is reported in Gertrude Stein’s autobiography, which she impishly mistitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. During the first winter of the Great War, as she and Pablo Picasso were walking at night on the Boulevard Raspail, ‘All of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spellbound. ‘C’est onus qui avons fait ca,’ he said, ‘it is we who have created that.’”

A lot of the entries are biographical entries of key camoufleurs (the artists and officers responsible for the techniques), which in themselves are quite dry. However, the tapestry of these characters comes to life when you come across an entry about how their work has been adopted by the fashion world or incorporated into a audacious method for hiding entire munitions factories. Behrens clearly knows his stuff, and is generous with his references to other resources. As well as the encyclopedic structure. there’s a comprehensive bibliography, index and timeline (which goes all the way back to Darwin’s theory of natural selection).

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Of course, as fascinating as the text is, when you pick up a book about camouflage, you want pictures. Big pictures. Big colour pictures. This is where Camoupedia’s format lets the subject-matter down a little. Where the reproduced pictures are simple line-work, such as the numerous drawings submitted for bizarre patent applications, the black-and-white print works fine. However, when you’re looking at a picture of a brightly-coloured aircraft or an animal blending in to its background, the lack of colour robs it of any impact. Ironically, the camouflage on display is so good, at times you can’t actually see it. I’m sure the author would have loved to have had a full-colour coffee table tome, so it is not so much a criticism of his work, but of the budgetary constraints of a book that is unlikely to shift huge numbers and whose source material was probably black and white in any case.

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That said, at least there is no shortage of pictures. A lot of attention is paid to dazzle-painted camouflage – the technique of using brightly coloured, high contrast disruptive shapes on a ship’s hull, not as a means to hide it, but to force enemy U-boats into miscalculating its distance, speed and trajectory. Despite the lack of colour, the numerous photographs and technical drawings on display here contradict the common image of steel-grey WWII warships, instead revealing them to be garish and visually arresting, a style that rightfully garnered comparisons to the cubist movement. For me, looking at these designs led to a far-too-long stint on Google to look for bigger and better pictures, now armed with knowledge of the history behind them.

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On its own, this book is good – you learn some interesting things, you get a feel for the cultural context of the form – but Camoupedia’s real strength is as a starting point from which to explore one of the numerous intriguing avenues it sends you down. The breadth of the information contained in this book demonstrates how design can sit comfortably in the intersection of topics as diverse as nature, science, art and warfare. That such an encyclopedia still has a place in the modern I’ll-just-look-it-up-on-Wikipedia world is testament to the authority of Behrens’ research and his contagious love for the subject.

Update: Roy Behrens now has a blog collating his continuing research into the subject.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Camoupedia is published by Bobolink Books, Amazon US or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

Daniel Gray is a graphic designer living and working in York. He also writes the blog Binky the doormat and manages the Flickr group The Face (1980-2004)

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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 call design.

As designers, we have lived and breathed this process often enough to embody its power, in whatever domain we choose. For a businessperson, however, design is nebulous. A slippery fish. When placed on a slide under the accountant’s microscope, design can perish – even in the most progressive corporate culture. And without design, there is no innovation.

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But do not fear. To the rescue is Marty Neumeier, with The Designful Company (Amazon: US|CA|
UK|DE). Much like Mr. Neumeier’s other bestsellers, The Brand Gap and Zag, his new whiteboard overview is set to completely reinvigorate how our profession engages executives in the boardroom. Finally, we have a shared vocabulary that marries aesthetics to business – and from a book with such simplicity, elegance, and verve, it’s downright humbling.

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The premise of the book is founded upon one of my favorite subjects, wicked problems:

“…problems so persistent, pervasive, or slippery that they seem insoluble. Unlike the relatively tame problems found in math, chess, or cost accounting, wicked problems tend to shift disconcertingly with every attempt to solve them. Moreover, the solutions are never right or wrong, just better or worse… In the world of business, managers face a subset of these problems: breakneck change, omniscient customers, balkanized markets, rapacious shareholders, traitorous employees, regulatory headlocks, and pricing pressure from desperate global competitors with little to lose and everything to gain.”

Wicked problems now completely govern the world of business and commerce. You can’t combat these problems in a traditional, Six Sigma-esque manner. Solving these problems requires replacing “the win-lose nature of the assembly line with the win-win nature of the network.”

This network is powered by considerations of human need. In order to accomplish this, you need to raise an executive’s view and application of design from the world of aesthetics – posters and toasters – ”to include “processes, systems, and organizations.” A powerful byproduct of embedding design within a corporation is increased agility, which helps businesses to create change instead of reacting to change. Or, in Marty’s words:

“A company can’t ‘will’ itself to be agile… To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture… It’s one thing to inject a company WITH inventiveness. It’s another thing to build a company ON inventiveness. To organize for agility, your company needs to develop a ‘designful mind.’”

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Demonstrating ways in which design can be factored into corporate governance is the core argument of his book, which he unpacks elegantly across 180 well-designed pages. In simple language, he provides simple descriptions of such complex topics as: the value of using abductive logic as part of a design process versus the use of strictly rational thought; the importance of design making to inform business decision-making; how design thinking can permeate every level of a firm’s corporate ladder; and an intriguing chart that aligns aesthetic principles such as scale, proportion, pattern, and repetition with considerations of business strategy and organizational structure. The latter, with its fusion of art and business considerations, has been long-needed and will immediately enrich any designer’s vocabulary.

The last third of the book is devoted to what Marty calls “levers for change.” Most savvy designers will recognize many of these tactics, which are regularly employed in design and innovation firms with varying degrees of effect. However, for a C-level executive that is behind the innovation curve, these tactics may be downright revolutionary.

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Take, for example, “Lever 2: Weave a Rich Story.” Every action that someone takes within your company is part of the overall story that you’re telling to your customers and to your coworkers. But Marty wants you to think of the meta-story for any organization:

“While revolution must be led from the top, it rarely starts at the top. The spirit of revolution already exists in the hearts and minds of motivated employees and loyal customers. It shows up in the individual stories that employees tell about the work they do. And it shows up in the individual stories that customers tell about the products they love. Often a leader need only act as a kind of managing editor, shaping the stories to align with a shared vision. To make the best use of this lever, all the little stories you tell about your company and its products should add up to one big story.”

To be effective, designers must be storytellers through their work, but our clients must be the stewards and owners of that story. In the end, it’s always their story to tell. And if companies better understand how to apply the power of design, they can better manifest that story and delight their customers across every touch point of the customer experience.

Sounds easy, right? Being that mindful about how your company behaves can be quite difficult to manage… that is, without the power of design. Marty uses JetBlue as a case study that describes in detail how this can be accomplished.

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Another notable lever is “Lever 9, Sanction Spitballing,” in which Marty describes ways to encourage more ideas from more employees from within your company to fuel the engine of innovation. However, my favorite lever is the one that closes the book: “Reward with Wicked Problems.”

“While most employees appreciate public acclaim and the occasional monetary award, the highest achievers want something more. They want bigger problems. They want an opportunity to tackle mean, hairy challenges and make a significant contribution to the company.”

Taking such a corporate stance takes guts, because if you’re tackling a wicked problem, you’re going to spend a lot of time wrestling with change. But as Marty says at the close of the book, “Change is power. Design is change.” Being able to be the maelstrom instead of stand within the maelstrom is going to separate successful enterprises from major corporate failures in the upcoming years.

In the back of the book, Marty includes a comprehensive reading list, a sound-bite summary of the most delicious details from across the book, and a list of the top ten wicked problems facing today’s businesses – as well as wicked solutions that could begin to untangle the mess that we call today’s marketplace.

If you’re looking for one book to hand to your design client that will move their consideration of design to a higher level, this is it. And it’s almost a shame that this book is filed away in the management section at your local bookstore – because every strategy-minded designer should own it as well.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can find The Designful Company on Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

David Sherwin is Sr. Art Director, UX Strategy at Worktank in Seattle, Washington. He maintains the blog ChangeOrder: Business + Process of Design and is writing a book about concepting for HOW Design Press due to be released in November 2010.

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(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 roller coaster between peaks of fame and harsh setbacks, all of which he felt bitterly.’ – Tim Benton, The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

Unlike extemporaneous speeches, books and most published writing endure rounds of editing that can alter the rawness of an argument. Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modern design and prolific writer who lectured with conviction about rethinking the crowded urban environment, frequently appealed to his audience with a vulnerable yet authoritative tone that cannot be felt solely from reading his body of written work.

So it is interesting and rather ironic that a book, The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer by Tim Benton (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) addresses the gap between the great architect’s published works and ‘Le Corbusier in action’. Through his research, Benton exposes thoughts and emotional appeals that Le Corbusier would have modified or toned down from his lectures for inclusion in books or journal. In his detailed and close reading of the ways in which the famous architect connected and communicated with his audience, Benton reminds us that Le Corbusier’s zeal for the avant-garde and his penchant for publishing and lecturing factor into his significance in architectural history as much (if not more than) his built architecture.

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In the book’s four chapters, Benton traces the logic of Le Corbusier’s lecture technique, explains the origins, similarities and differences of his architecture and urbanism lectures and discusses a series of ten talks given in Buenos Aires in 1929. An appendix with a collection of notes, sketches and revised lecture transcripts follows.

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Through drawing, Le Corbusier demonstrated on-the-spot artistic skills to bolster his orations and underscore his credibility as an architect. Benton succeeds in linking reproductions of the sketches to the arguments delivered by the architect; glancing back and forth from text to the image, the reader can get a sense of the spoken aspect of the lecture while seeing the things that Le Corbusier would draw.

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Of the hundreds of books produced about Le Corbusier, The Rhetoric of Modernism’s clear focus makes it a more valuable contribution to the scholarship than yet another book about Corbusian master plans. The book’s production values, design and materials also convey the research in a way that calls attention to the quality of the medium; the heavy matte paper feels like pages from a sketchbook and re-emphasizes the humble origins of the Le Corbusier’s great lectures. The shape, weight and layout also call to the mind the instructive nature of textbooks.

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While the layout appears rigidly defined in some spreads, with neatly aligned text, dramatic margins and footnotes, it also morphs at times, defying the rules it has set for itself.

The quality and richness of the images is striking. The inclusion of incredibly detailed reproductions of Le Corbusier’s notes guarantees that a significant (yet welcome) part of reading the book will involve deciphering the mad scribbles of a genius. For those who do not read French or who for those who, despite repeated attempts, cannot read Le Corbusier’s handwriting, Benton provides translations.

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In the book, Le Corbusier’s work speaks for itself; the amount of primary source material equals the amount of Benton’s writing. Throughout the text, Benton sets up excerpts from interviews and lecture transcripts and interjects with the findings of his research. Through the use of different fonts, the book designers, Marine Gille and Line Martin-Célo, have found a way to clearly delineate Benton’s writing from his source’s words.

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The well researched and rich writing requires a heightened level of attention that can, at times, impede the flow of reading and complete appreciation of the book requires existing familiarity with some of Le Corbusier’s projects. The Rhetoric of Modernism isn’t the best introduction to Le Corbusier, but it is a must-read for students and teachers of architecture. Presenting ideas verbally can be more forceful, emotional, free and ultimately more successful than imparting theories via printed matter.

Considering the number of boring lectures I’ve attended over the years, I see this book as much needed ‘how-to’ manual. Benton’s book is an invaluable tool for understanding how the greatest architect of the twentieth century disseminated his ideas, and a useful glimpse into the art of lecturing.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer by Tim Benton is published by Birkhäuser and is available via Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

Becky Quintal is a student in the School of Visual Arts Design Criticism program. She has an undergraduate degree in architecture from Princeton University. She can be found tweeting at @beckq.

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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 a very good thing, however, that Dreyfuss is decidedly not a silent salesman. In fact, his message is so powerful that it serves as an accidental harbinger of the times we face as designers today, filled by economic uncertainty and the struggle to move from products and services based on fashion to those that are effective and substantive. Dreyfuss hoists the flag of human-centered design 40-odd years before our struggles with defining digital interactions began, yet his message is as true and applicable now as it was then.

Designing for People takes us through Dreyfuss’ decision to establish himself as an industrial designer, expanding from his early career designing theater sets, through the growth of his practice and business and up to the state of industrial design in the early 1950s. The book moves through design thought and philosophy, stories of projects and results, exposition of what the design business is about, and predictions of what industrial designers will work on in the future. He also throws in anecdotal collections of amusing design gaffes and the questions he received over the years. As one would hope, the organization flows smoothly, each section setting the stage for the next.

Dreyfuss’ style is easy and light. Even when making a serious point or giving a detailed explanation of design, he phrases and frames in a manner that allows the reader to comprehend quickly yet deeply:

Q. How do you start an industrial design problem?

A. We begin with men and women and we end with them. We consider the potential user – habits, physical dimensions, and psychological impulses. We also measure their purse, which is what I meant by ending with them, for we must conceive not only a satisfactory design, but also one that incorporates that indefinable appeal to assure purchase. The Greek philosopher Protagoras had a phrase for it, ‘Man is the measure of all things.’”

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Succinct, but packed with meaning that makes careers and businesses, Dreyfuss is not only a good storyteller – a quality we have come to recognize as important in a designer – but he can boil the stories down to important thoughts, plainly stated, which makes for wonderful learning and reinforcement.

As an experienced designer, feelings of encouragement and expansion came up again and again for me as I went through the book. As with Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences, I found myself frequently stopping my reading to appreciate and ponder Dreyfuss’ words and how precisely applicable they are today, half a century on.

Indeed, many of the lessons he imparts are timeless and he presents them fluidly within the recounting of his professional life. Powerful and clear concepts such as inside out design, user focus, definitions of design success, design ethics, and the role of design working with business are presented again and again in ways that make them resonate more strongly each time.

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These include classic ideas such as the human models Joe and Josephine (above), “cleanlined”, strong arguments for designers to forge solid relationships with engineers and business managers, and industrial design as “a great equalizer”. His ideas are augmented with photographs, drawings and whimsical sketches providing explanation and insight into his view of the world through the lens of design. Dreyfuss adds further to the sense of “design for the ages” by giving it a history starting with Leonardo da Vinci and moving through Benjamin Franklin, followed by the mid-19th century English Council for the Society of Arts and the American Abolitionist movement.

History is not always kind, of course, and Designing for People feels understandably anachronistic at times, though in ways that support the idea of evolution of design rather than discrediting or marring the primary message. Reading it with today’s sensibilities, one will find some gender and class issues, little acknowledgement of environmental concerns, a fascination with the sterile and modern, and, most sadly, clear evidence that today’s society has lost much of the trust and respect that one could count on in those days.

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Dreyfuss closes with two views of the future circa 2000, one from 1955 and then 1967. He expresses appreciable amazement at what happened in those 12 years, then predicts a sort of Jetsonian future of disposable clothing and linens based on the Space Age occurrences he witnessed. In the midst of starry-eyed musings, he maintains focus on what a designer knows he or she must do:

“The industrial designer’s task is still to relate the inanimate with the animate, to improve a world of non-designer people, non-designer machines and non-designed things, the things you bump your head and bang your shins on, the things that gum up, waste space, cost too much, cost even more to maintain, and are ugly to boot. These are today’s villains and they’ll still be villains tomorrow.” (pg 246)

He goes on to say that technology may make the problems worse, and I daresay we would agree that it has, thus proving his long-lasting wisdom.

(More about Henry Dreyfuss including a list of some of the iconic products he designed.)

You can find Designing for People in Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) and The Designer’s Review of Books store.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Already read this book? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

About the Reviewer

Phillip Hunter (@designoutloud) is an interaction designer for voice, desktop, and web applications. He also writes the blog, Design Out Loud.

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