This is going to be a short review because there have been so many reviews and commentaries about the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson (Amazon: US|UK|DE) that it seems there is almost nothing left to say. The question this review sets out to answer is, “why should designers read Steve Jobs’s biography?”

On a personal level, reading through the history of the development of Jobs’s main two successful companies, Apple and Pixar, was fascinating and at times moving, because I’ve worked on so many of the Macs mentioned. I first saw an Apple Lisa (or it may have been an XL) at an architect’s house and was fascinated, especially having whiled away my youth on a BBC Micro and a ZX Spectrum. At college I wrote my first essays on a Macintosh Classic, did my first exercise in Photoshop 2.0 on a Macintosh LC II, my first interactive work after HyperCard using Macromind Director 3.0 on those same LC II’s and, later, my first video and audio work on a Quadra 700. The first Mac I ever owned was a Quadra 650 – the machine that got me through my BA.

I’ve long been excited about the development of 3D animation from very early days and remember being enthralled by the possibilities in a 1984 book that I was given, Computergraphia, that captured some of those early computer graphics years. When I started seeing Pixar’s short films, I knew animation was going to change radically in the years to come. I also realized how crucial good storytelling was to the process – there were a lot of tragically computer science directed “films” (better called demos) floating around in those days.

So much for taking you on a trip down my technology memory lane. Should you care? I think, as designers, most readers will have had similar experiences and, at the very least, it is a nostalgia trip. In some ways reading it also honors Jobs and the things he created that made our current professions possible.

A few months ago I wrote a piece for Core77 that argued that, unlike the hard sciences, design has failed to develop a coherent voice in public discourse. When Steve Jobs died, I realized that he was pretty much it – the one person in widespread public discourse about design who made the case for its value. Whatever you or others may think about his personality, the “reality distortion field”, or Apple’s products in general, there is no debating that an awful lot of non-design people knew of his name, his views and his work. Some of that comes across in the biography, but none of this is really going to make you better and designing things, although it might make you a little more thoughtful as you consider the tips given to him by his father:

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

The parts of the book that seem to have been less commented on, but that I found more usable in a practical way, were the stories about the interpersonal relationships that made or broke the critical deals that Jobs made. Some of them multi-million dollar ones, such as the deal between Pixar and Disney.

I suspect many designers have somewhat of an aversion to, if not a phobia of, the corporate world and the kind of Big Deal Making that sometimes goes on and that equally seems averse to designers and everything they stand for. While I am sure that Jobs’s approach was pretty unusual, most of the other parties to those deals were more classically corporate folk. For a designer, this book is worth reading just for an insight into how people build and lose companies and client relationships and for understanding how personalities play 90% of the role in working life.

Despite the prevalence of talk about design and Jobs’s deep love and understanding for it, some of the more interesting parts of the book are not about design at all.

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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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I had better start by owning up to not having read Designers Don’t Read by Howe – I had seen lots of press for it but never got round to picking up a copy. So I have come to his second book without reading the first, but Designers Don’t Have Influences (Amazon US|CA|UK|DE) is stand-alone and can be picked up without any prior knowledge of Howe or his writing.

Designers Don’t Have Influences is a collection of short essays on people that have influenced Howe throughout his successful career in advertising. Rather than write about people working directly in his field Howe writes about all sorts of people from various disciplines. He writes in the forward:

“My basic premise is that we can often learn more from people in other disciplines than we can from our own”

This really resonated with me. As a designer my own influences are often from beyond my profession and can be divorced from their context. Howe’s introduction had already got me excited about reading on.

“Disclaimer: this book is not an exhaustive compendium of every notable author or artist or inventor or entrepreneur. It’s really more of a random collection of individuals who have impacted me in some way – people I think most designers would probably appreciate knowing a little more about.”

There are no work samples in the book – Howe explains that Designers Don’t Have Influences follows in the “spirit and tradition of Norman Potter’s little gem, What is a designer: Things, Places, Messages” (a book I would also recommend, Potter is a great influence on me). Howe also explains that he wanted to dismiss the idea that designers don’t read – hence the title of his first book.

Each chapter in Designers Don’t Have Influences is a self contained essay. At the start of each chapter is the estimated time it will take to read it – I loved this element (one he uses in Designers Don’t Read), as I could pick up the book in my lunch time, waiting for a tube, sitting on Brighton beach, and flick to a chapter which I knew I would be able to read in the time I had. I felt I was carrying round a bunch of observations and ideas I could dip into rather than a book I would have to read from page one onwards. Each chapter has a little nugget of Howe thinking, seemingly designed to make you think a little, question a little and maybe re-evaluate your position and approach to your design work.

Some of the chapters are simply Howe’s observations of the experiences of working with others in and around his industry – the chapter on Bill Cahan gives a great insight into the processes of an innovative and successful design agency and those that run it. Many of Howe’s other subjects will be familiar to designers, the ubiquitous Ayn Rand gets a chapter, as do the Saatchis, Julian Schnabel, Josef Müller-Brockman and Damien Hirst, but it is the people I had never heard of that interested me the most – a great example is the chapter on François Allaire, a Canadian Hockey goalie coach. As a Yorkshireman who grew up with only a passing interest in football (my trips to Elland Road were on the whim of friends, I was never a committed football fan), there was no way I was going to have heard of a Canadian Hockey coach. Within this chapter Howe explains how Allaire re-invented goalie coaching from the ground up, and coached some of the most successful goalies in Hockey history. Howe writes about how Allaire can be an influence to someone working in the field of design:

“First of all he teaches us that it can be done, wherever and whenever it is actually attempted. That by questioning the conventions of how something has been done for years, we can find new ways of approaching it, simply by being aware, observant, ambitious.”

At the back of the book, once the essays are over, there’s a collection of doodle style portraits of the chapters subjects (along side a quote), credited to Aaron James. – my favourite is the starey scary disembodied Damien Hirst, but Maurice Saatchi’s portrait is worth a mention. I also liked the book design and typography credited to Fredrik Averin – a seemingly modernist design subverted with bold lines striking through the words, a treatment carried through from the cover to the chapters headings.

Maurice Saatchi

The best accolade I can give this book is that I already have bought his first book on the back of this one – and I will be keeping an eye on out for further publications and writing by Howe.

About the Reviewer

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

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A small part of the book White is about color:

“it is ‘all colors’ and ‘no colors’ at the same time. This identity as a color that can ‘escape color’ makes white very special. If white is not simply a color, mightn’t we be able to understand it as functioning like a design or expressive concept?”

As a well-known graphic designer and art director at Muji, author Kenya Hara uses a variety of colors all the time. He does not even especially love white. As he has progressed in his career, though, he has slowly moved away from bright, vivid colors and gravitated to subtler, more natural hues. Inspiration was found in items like sand, handmade paper, seeds, rust, milk, cardboard, clouds, and weathered books. Of those, white has had the most profound impact for him.

The Japanese character for white is part of the compound character for emptiness. The connection between those words is a strong one throughout this slim volume.

“The mechanism of communication is activated when we look at an empty vessel, not as a negative state, but in terms of its capability to be filled with something.”

Paper is compared to the principle of itoshiroshi (shiro is Japanese for white), described as an intense purity full of potential. Hara has a strong conviction that simply holding a sheet of paper is like standing before a blank canvas, in that it will trigger the imagination of creative people.

Photography, painting, poetry, architecture and even tea ceremonies serve as solid examples of Hara’s concepts. For instance, he writes that Hasegawa Tohaku’s spare, foggy “Pine Trees” painting provokes our senses with its strong brush strokes and deliberate lack of detail. And, the effective use of white space between the trees actually suggests many more trees beyond what we can see.

“In other words, an unpainted space should not be seen as an information-free area: the foundation of Japanese aesthetics lies in that empty space and a host of meanings have been built upon it. An important level of communication thus exists within the dimension we call ‘white.’”

That empty space in communication is an interesting point. He writes about the power of non-verbal communication—a nod, or eye contact—that can convey so much. He acknowledges that Japanese communication, often leaving much unsaid (like subjects of sentences), can be difficult to understand when compared to the more direct western system. But, he views people reaching a consensus in silence to be a highly refined level of communication. And he reminds us that listening is a crucial part of effective communication.

The book’s design is clean and quiet: almost all text, with black serif type on white paper. Four images, including a 4-page gatefold of the “Pine Trees” painting, are placed together at the back of the book.  It would be more effective if the visuals were placed near the text where they are mentioned. A white ribbon marker adds a nice touch.

There is a calm, almost soothing rhythm to the text that feels appropriate. I think there is an over-reliance on quotation marks and on the phrase “in short,” but overall the writing is simple and clear.

Reading this has encouraged me to take a step back and look at white and emptiness in a more thoughtful manner. Perhaps my own design work can benefit from an occasional knowing nod rather than a shout. I am also more aware of the different nuances and levels of white that exist. While I have always been a big fan of white space, I now understand white to be much more than a color.

Designers of all kinds should find something of value in this book. Though it may seem as if Hara, also author of the much heftier Designing Design, is advocating a minimalist style, it runs deeper than that:

“The roots of expressions like … ‘less is more’ are subtly different than those that underlie emptiness. Emptiness does not merely imply simplicity of form, logical sophistication and the like. Rather, emptiness provides a space within which our imaginations can run free, vastly enriching our powers of perception and our mutual comprehension. Emptiness is this potential.”

White is published by Lars Müller Publishers and you can purchase it from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE).

About the Reviewer
John Clifford is Creative Director at Think Studio, an award-winning graphic design firm in NYC focusing on brand identity, web sites, collateral, packaging, and books.

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Women Of Design: Influence And Inspiration From The Original Trailblazers To The New Groundbreakers is one of four books that have been written by the husband and wife team of Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit. You can find the expanse of their work, which includes many recognizable websites from the design community, their other 3 books, and the occasional client work they do at UnderConsideration. They are large contributors to the education of the design community as a whole and this book is an excellent example of just how committed they are to sharing what they have personally learned with the rest of the world.

(Click to enlarge)

The book takes a look at how graphic design has evolved over the past century and chronicles the work of many of the women who played significant roles in shaping the way that design developed. While the initial goal was to include only thirty profiles, the authors note that the number was quickly exceeded and more than doubled in the end. There are 72 different women designers represented within the book. I certainly won’t list them all here, but some highlights include: Elaine Lustig Cohen, Paula Scher, Ellen Lupton, Jessica Helfand, Petrula Vrontikis, Debbie Millman, Irma Boom and Marian Bantjes.

(Click to enlarge)

The book is divided into three sections, Trailblazers, Pathfinders, and Groundbreakers. The designers are grouped into these sections roughly according to the era during which their most influential works were created. Each section is prefaced with a short paragraph describing the time period on which it is focused.

(Click to enlarge)

Each profile includes a paragraph about the work of the designer, several details about their career, and a short interview. The interviews vary in length and content depending on the designer and there are a few that do not have an interview at all. The personality of the designers and their opinions about their work, design, culture and education are immediately evident in the interviews and it was rewarding to get a peek into their personal and professional lives. The interviews are complimented nicely by a wealth of imagery of the designers work.

(Click to enlarge)

It is obvious that the authors had done their research quite well as all of the questions were poignant and relevant to the career of the designer. One example, from the interview with Paula Scher:

Typography, in all its forms, shapes and sizes , has been integral to your body of work. If you would indulge us in a little allegory… What do you expect typography to do in your hands? What do you see in letterforms?

Scher’s answer:

Letterforms are abstractions. Words have meanings. Designing with typography can be a form of abstract expression

(Click to enlarge)

While I am not a fan of the justified text found within the interviews, the entire book is set nicely in Ronnia and Odile. There are pull-quotes found within each interview and several key ones are given their own single-page spreads throughout the book. There is also a wonderful chart at the beginning of the book which lists individuals who inspire the people within the book and all of the women are listed as contributors in the back with handy references to their personal websites. A must-own for anyone interested in the development of graphic design from the 1960′s into the 21st century, this book gives readers insight that is seldom found in a still male-dominated profession.

You can find out more about the book over at UnderConsideration. Women of Design is published by How 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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What the public eye sees most often is the finished design work – beautifully printed posters, books, websites, packaging, and signage. But little is known or said about the studios that labor day and night to deliver something creative and coherent, beautiful yet functional, all while earning enough money to survive. Studio Culture: The Secret Life of the Graphic Design Studio by Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook is the first book released by Unit Editions, and offers to shed light on this too often overlooked subject.

The 28 interviews in the book capture well the breadth of studios that exist today. Some have large numbers of designers and offices around the world (Pentagram), while others consist of less than ten (Tassinar/Vetta) or even just one designer (Marian Bantjes). There are the more traditional studios that gather everyone in one room (Milton Glaser), and other groups that operate almost entirely remotely (Non-Format). With this diversity, the book gives no simple answers to the questions all studios face, because each one is different.

For example, there’s the issue of choosing between profitable work and projects with lots of creative control. One studio answers, “We created a complex algorithm for how to take on or turn away new business. ‘The Three Fs’ refers to Fun, Fame, and Fortune. Pick two, any two, and it’s OK to take on.’” A larger studio may instead be forced to take on more profitable projects in order to continue paying their teams of designers.

One topic I found particularly absorbing was the studios’ founding stories. There are designers who discovered their partners while still in school, and decided to work together upon graduation. Others chose to work at established studios, building up enough reputation and talent before striking out on their own. For readers that are considering going independent, it can be comforting to learn that many studios were just as clueless as they feel, and had to figure everything out slowly.

The interviews touch on an impressive range of topics. Discussion on hiring interns, crediting individual designers, and the benefits of a good accountant appear alongside lighter talk of music policy and studio parties. All are important considerations for a studio. Shaughnessy and Brook, show a clear understanding of each studio’s work and draw out compelling responses from their interviewees.

“We have our Christmas parties, and we have our summer parties in between our picnics. We don’t go over the top. We don’t hire people to plan our parties. But I think they are important.”

The book is a joy to hold and to read. There is a wonderful texture to the cover’s canvas material. Each interview is presented with color thumbnails of the studio’s work, labeled with the clients and short descriptions. References to designers or other people are marked with helpful endnotes, making this very accessible to readers. The entire book is set in Optimo Hermes, and through resourceful use of size and color, there is a strong sense of hierarchy and order.

This book is essential reading for anyone looking to set up their own studio, not because it provides any definite answers, but instead presents an entire spectrum of them. Each studio holds a different philosophy and makes different choices. For those simply interested in the workings of design studios, the book offers a comprehensive view of the challenges that they face and the stories of those who have found some success.

About the Reviewer

Allen Tan is a designer, editor, and 4th year architecture student at University of California, Berkeley. He has a website at Tanmade.com and can be found on Twitter.

Studio Culture: The Secret Life of a Graphic Design Studio by Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook is published by Unit Editions. You can also buy it from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or support the Designer’s Review of Books by buying it from our store.

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Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives

Review by Jennifer New

Repository, Incubator, Laboratory, Sketchbook

I had to chuckle when I read DRoB Editor Andy Polaine’s recent take on the creative process his review of Designers Don’t Read:

“Over my own years of writing, I have learned a great deal more about the creative process as a designer than I have through designing.”

The statement seems to hold a truism since as I writer I can invert it and it still works beautifully: I’ve learned more about the creative process through working with designers than through writing.

So what is the truism that resides here? We can more clearly discern the creative process when we step away from our own medium. It’s easier to deconstruct a process that is not automatic to us.

I’ve seen this as I try to teach my children things that have become rote for me. Teasing apart the art of tying a shoe turns out to be surprisingly difficult. As is teaching the front crawl for a former competitive swimmer or how to drive stick shift when you’ve been doing it on auto-pilot for decades. Once something has become effortless, stripping it apart becomes increasingly difficult.

It’s very exciting then when someone willingly cracks open the window on his or her creative process and offers a glimpse into the steps leading up to a so-called finished product, be it a novel, a song, or a painting. It provides inspiration and a bit of solace to see that artists of all calibers take leaps of faith and engage in play that is not immediately or obviously useful. Sometimes, they even land on their asses and get a bit bruised.

An artist’s sketchbook, when viewed in its entirety, provides this kind of developmental snapshot of the creative process. You can see its maker going through the creative steps (not necessarily in this order): Imagine, dream, play, research, generate, edit, share, polish, repeat.

However, when someone else edits their pages for public presentation, you lose some of the messier parts and the work can appear more complete than it really is. I know. I edited the visual journals of thirty creative thinkers into a book [Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art
- Ed.]. Although I tried to maintain some of the journals’ blemishes, in the end, it proved too tempting to put in the really fine and lovely parts over the mash-ups. Luckily, the artists’ own reflections on their work proved to be as telling as the art with regard to the creative process.

The same holds true in this new book that covers much the same ground as my own, though with a new cast of artists wielding pens, brushes and scissors. The creatives profiled in Richard Breteton’s Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators & Creatives, (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) share their work—much of it very lovely and leaning toward the more polished end of the spectrum—as well as insights into how they work.

The poet Adrienne Rich has said that the notes for the poem are the poem. Likewise, one might argue that the journal pages featured in Sketchbooks, even those intended as movements toward an eventual finished work, are works in and of themselves.

Sketchbooks and journals (I am not a stickler on the terminology) tear open a series of questions: What is finished? Is anything ever finished? What is the allure of the deconstructed object, i.e., the novel interrupted with notes from its author; the film shot out of order; the dress whose stitching and inner structure are purposely visible?

They also ignite questions about privacy, namely, do we value a work differently if it was not intentionally created for public viewing? Intentionality is, for me, a big marker in whether something constitutes a true sketchbook or journal. When I blog, for instance, I intentionally write for an audience. But when I work in my journal, I work for myself – even if I am willing to share some pages with others later.

Safety is key in a journal—safety to explore, to mess up, to try on entirely new styles and voices. One contributor to Sketchbooks, John Hendrix, writes (all of the book’s prose, save for the introduction, is first-person from the artists):

“The sketchbook should be a place where it is safe to make mistakes. If a sketchbook is not a repository of raw ideas, but a touring portfolio of my best work, it loses the very thing that makes it special.”

In addition to providing this safe place, journals also teach an artist to hone his or her work. Holly Wales, a London-based illustrator, says,

“Keeping a sketchbook is a good way of teaching yourself how to edit well—you begin to fine-rune your ability to know exactly what to keep and what to discard. You realize that what you leave out is as important as you put in.”

Likewise, designer Johnny Hardstaff calls his journals “incubators,” and is only interested in his current one:

“Once finished, once complete, my sketchbooks are worthless. In a way they are themselves filters. They filter away the whimsical, the faddish and the pointless. That way, the only useful sketchbook is the current one, which carries forth with it interesting trains of thought.”

I’m drawn to Hardstaff’s in-the-moment incubator, as it is the opposite of the twee journals that have become popular with the artist book crowd. Such overly produced journals crowd out our playfulness; they chide us into being more perfect and more lovely. They prevent us from recording our truest selves.

And our truest selves will live at the center of our journals if we listen. Peter James Field, an English artist and illustrator has been keeping sketchbooks since he was five, and when he takes out even the oldest ones, he sees that he hasn’t really changed that much, nor have the books:

“Then as now, I was trying to look around and make something lasting from the mundane things that surrounded me. … I was using drawing to digest and give meaning to the outside world.”

Brereton hints at the elasticity of the visual journal through his inclusion of drawings by the team at FUEL, a London-based design firm, who contributed drawings on newspapers that they do together over lunch and which they call a form of “desktop graffiti”. There are also different sketchbooks for dinner purposes. Pep Carrio, a designer in Madrid, does a daily drawing in one sketchbook but then keeps another near his telephone for drawing during conversations. “A sketchbook,” he said, “is like a kid of portable laboratory…a memory warehouse.”

There is now a sketchbook app for the iPhone, and the artist David Hockney has been doing sketches on his iPhone and iPad for a while. Others save images on their phone or on Flicker or Facebook and arrange these later. Arguably, these are the new iteration of the journal, and it will be interesting to see how they influence and contribute to artists’ work in the future.

But the paper journal will not be lost, no matter how many pixilated playthings we add to our repertoire. Its functionality, ease of use, and the pure tactile pleasure are irreplaceable.

About the Reviewer

Jennifer New is the author of Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art. Her own site is jennifernew.com.

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I could use some help.

When I started the Designer’s Review of Books, I had a bit of time on my hands and managed to keep a steady flow of weekly reviews. I have been helped along the way by some generous guest reviewers and to them I am very grateful. However, since starting a more time-consuming day job the pile of books to review on my desk has grown alarmingly large.

Regular readers will have noticed that the stream of reviews has grown to a trickle and that’s no good. I do have two guest reviews to put online very soon, but I am finding it hard to find the time to even read all the books to review, let alone write reviews.

So I have decided to open the site up in order to build up a handful of regular contributors. These contributors will have their accounts for the blog’s interface and will publish as and when they like without any interference from me beyond any disasters that might need an editorial eye.

What’s in it for you? Good question. I don’t have a huge budget – in fact I really don’t have any budget – for the site, but I don’t want to shut it down either. You can use the name of the site and/or my contacts with publishers to receive review copies of books. These you can usually keep, but you do really need to write a review of anything you request specifically. I’m happy to make contact on your behalf. You can put an ad for your own site or services in the large rotator box on the top-right of the sidebar and you are welcome to use your own Amazon affiliate ID in your posts as well as put links and information in your byline. In return you should be able to show you can write insightfully and be conscious of correct grammar and spelling. I will still reserve an editorial veto on anything, but I plan never to use it.

If you feel you might be interested, please let me know.

One last thing – I’d be very grateful if you could tweet and retweet this invite.

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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.

(Click to enlarge)

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.

(Click to enlarge)

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.

(Click to enlarge)

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.”

(Click to enlarge)

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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