From the category archives:

Photography

Fully Booked: Cover Art & Design for Books

Fully Booked

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

Read the full article →

Daniel Eatock – Imprint

Daniel Eatock - Imprint

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

Read the full article →

I Am My Family

I Am My Family

Review by Andrew Shea
We all want to know what our ancestors were like 50, 100 or even 200 years ago. Rafael Goldchain’s new book, I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE), answers these questions by dressing up as his deceased relatives and taking black and white photographs that represent his scattered and [...]

Read the full article →

Imposters

Imposters

Hollywood Boulevard is filled with people dressed us famous characters all trying to make a buck from having their photos taken with tourists. Some consider them part of the local colour, some panhandling nuisances. Like any subculture, the scene has its share of fanatics, politics and code of conduct as well as plenty of stories.
Imposters [...]

Read the full article →

The Advertising Concept Book

The Advertising Concept Book

What makes a good ad? What makes an award-winning creative idea? These days its easy to get distracted by fancy art direction and technological novelties, but when you strip all that away, does the idea still stand up?
This is the essence of Pete Barry’s The Advertising Concept Book (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) in which you won’t see [...]

Read the full article →

UPPERCASE Magazine

uppercase magazine

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

Read the full article →

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

Cars

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

Read the full article →

Tangible: High Touch Visuals

Tangible

“Remember the small, cheeky, hand-scribbled notes that were reproduced on a photo or poster design? Those with the simple message: “I was here!” Indicating that someone actually worked with the photo and that these are their thoughts.” – from the Preface to Tangible: High Touch Visuals.
In such a digitally dominant world, Gestalten’s new book, Tangible: [...]

Read the full article →

Three Books on Colour – Part Two: An Eye for Color

(Click to enlarge)

An Eye for Color by the fantastically-named Olga Gutierrez de la Roza is the second in our Three Books on Colour series following on from Kelvin: Colour Today, which we reviewed in Decemeber.
I was initially a bit skeptical about yet another book on colour, especially these days with sites like Adobe’s Kuler and [...]

Read the full article →