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 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 forgotten family history.

Martha Langford, an independent curator, introduces the book with an engaging essay that underscores Goldchain’s driving desire to connect his newborn son with the memory, imagination and identity of his Jewish ancestry:

“Each of these characters is appealing through the photographer for remembrance. The surprising thing is that some of these never-to-be-forgotten were never in fact born, or, if they were, may not have been related to Goldchain. I Am My Family is as much about imagining as remembering, though this kind of imagining is remembering…[it] can be read as an extended search for identity, this time embodied (literally) in those who gave him life.”

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Goldchain openly admits that he had to imagine much of his family history. In fact, some of the photographs have little or no reference to his ancestors but were inspired by a family story or memory. His Artist Statement follows Langford’s essay and he talks about being disconnected from his family history (his family fled Poland for Chile during the Nazi occupation and he has since moved to Mexico, Israel and now Canada), the photographic genre of self-portraiture and his process. Goldchain also points out the ghostly connotations that result from “emulating the look of early twentieth-century formal family-portrait photographs”:

“…in each of these portraits there are at least two main subjects: the ancestor being reenacted, and myself as the performer. These two subjects hover like ghosts in the photo, forcing the viewer to move between them, never able to see both at once.”

The fifty-four self-portraits come next. The first plate depicts Goldchain’s grandfather as a schoolboy and, like many of the photographs, is accompanied by a written description. This is Goldchain’s only performance as a child and it shows his willingness to fictionalize the ancestors he plays. In fact, there are no photos of his grandfather as a schoolboy. Goldchain candidly reveals which details are authentic in each photograph and which are fabrication or imitation. The most striking example in this photograph is the eagle emblem on the boy’s hat that was downloaded from the internet and Photoshopped onto the pin after the photograph was taken.

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There are only a few self-portraits where you struggle to see traces of Goldchain. Even when depicting the wrinkled age of his heavily accessorized ancestors, the personality of Goldchain’s eyes reveals his identity. As he puts it:

“…the ghostly figures of my ancestors emerge into visibility while simultaneously concealing themselves behind my own likeness and behind the conventions of the photographic portrait.”

It is hard to page through these images and not think of other self-portraiture photographers like Nikki Lee, who transforms herself into people that she met on the street. More famously, Cindy Sherman photographed herself in portraying actresses who belong in foreign films, B-movies, and film noir. Both of these photographers mask their identify in self-portraits but neither of them focus on such personal subject matter. Goldchain reinvents this photographic sub-genre by making it his mission to “…stage familial ghosts while simultaneously emphasizing and mourning their loss.”

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Goldchain’s portrayal of his paternal grandmother is one of my favorites. He closely approximates his grandmother’s hair, her listless expression and her striped blouse that is pinned with a broach. He convincingly crosses the gender except for a few nuanced details in her hair, dress and lighting. He also describes his process in the fourth section of the book, where you can see a photograph of his grandmother and his sketches.

The extensive research into his family tree is the focus of the fourth part of the book. This section clues the reader into Goldchain’s transformation into each character using makeup, wigs, lighting and the assistance of a small crew. As a performer, he plays the part of musicians, soldiers, rabbis and radio personalities that were bald, bearded, fat or gaunt.

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The book is beautifully designed. Each photograph has room to breath and is poetically described. Goldchain succeeds in making us interested in his family history. More important to the graphic design community is Goldchain’s total authorship of his personal project. This is not just a book of photos. Goldchain designed this project from his research into each character and his performance and authorship shows that he is entirely in control.

When I started to study photography, a friend told that every picture I ever take will be a self-portrait. I took the comment to be a needless distraction but I Am My Family embraces the adage and helps us to imagine ourselves in the faces of our family history.

I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions
by Rafael Goldchain
168 pages, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or through The Designer’s Review of Books store.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

About the Reviewer

Andrew Shea is currently a graduate student in the department of graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His thesis research focuses on the underlying principles that guide design for social change.

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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 by James Knoblauch & Shawna Kenney (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) explores this world and the out of work actors and vagrants who are its inhabitants. The combination of Knoblauch’s photographs of these characters, in costume, in their homes and the Kenney’s interview vignettes lends Imposters a simultaneously hilarious and melancholic air.

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There is no doubt that for many of the characters the boundary between their sense of self and their characters is blurred. In some respects they remain in a permanent state of fantasy escape from their existence, able to ignore the reality of a shabby bedsit for a few hours a day and be adored by fans.

“[Jack Sparrow] was homeless at the time. When he could afford it, he would shack up with some other Imposters in a nearby hotel. The great outdoors may have been a preferable sleeping arrangement compared to how some of Jack Sparrow’s peers lived. Freddy Krueger’s pad was by far the dirtiest one I had visited, with an unbelievable accumulation of cat hair, and pubic hair! And speaking of cat hair, Captain America was sharing a floor with six cats … Marilyn Monroe rented a room by the week right off the Boulevard. It was so dirty and depressing, and so small that I had to stand in the hallway to shoot.”

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For others it is just a job and one that paid well enough:

“Robin had recently moved into a studio apartment in a nice complex and planned on sharing it with his new wife and baby. Gandalf drove from his home in Arizona and would stay with his son in the foothills.”

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Amongst the characters, Batman and Superman are the two “regulators” because they have been working there the longest. Knoblauch describes how the two fell out when Superman asked Batman to help move his Superman collectables (which he claims is the biggest collection in the world). A confrontation with another driver parked in the way led to Superman disowning Batman and Batman being arrested. “Batman showed me a comic book he’d created called Stupidman,” writes Knoblauch. “It is filled with images of Batman kicking Superman’s ass.”

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The interviews range from very sketchy to the insightful. Wolverine is a firefighter and service technician for a plumbing company, but clearly feels his calling was to be Wolverine because he looks like him. He cites the worst part of the job as “people laughing at me in regular life thinking I look like him, but not knowing I am him, that I impersonate him on the side.” The “I am him” slip says it all.

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Batman, it turns out, has stopped “2 purse-snatchers, 1 shoplifter, and 1 assailant” during his time in costume and the Stormtrooper complains that, “people want to see how punch-proof the armor is. I’ve had to return some punches. I used to be a bouncer in a nightclub, so I know how to handle myself.”

The peculiar mixture of dreams hanging by a thread and surreality is ever present throughout the book and the fact that all of the characters talk about each other with their character names seems to add to the weirdness. Spongebob Squarepants (who, on his best day, made over $500 in tips) recounts his weirdest day:

“Batman and Bruce Lee had a fistfight that lasted about eight minutes. By the time the cops came, it was over, but a tourist taped it all. People thought it was just part of the show.”

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If this whets your appetite for seeing these characters in the flesh, the end of the book finishes with an interview with documentary filmaker David Markey who has made an a film called The Reinactors all about the, er, Imposters.

Imposters isn’t a long book (96 pages) and sometimes it would be nice to know a little more about the people behind the characters or have Knoblauch’s experience of shooting them on their pages rather than in the introduction. But it is a strangely compelling compilation and commentary on our culture’s obsession with celebrity.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Imposters is published by Mark Batty Publishers. 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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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 a single glossy image. No 3D, no photography, no screenshots, just pencil sketches and thumbnails. Sketches are still a staple of the process of developing concepts and pitches in everything from interaction and product design through to classic above-the-line advertising, which is what the book focuses on.

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“This way, the work is judged by its content, not by its cover. And in terms of my own work, I’d rather have a portfolio of brilliant-thinking roughs than brilliant-looking duffs. Showing fifty years’ worth of rough comps not only helps teachers to explain why an “old” ad is still a great ad, but it also forces students to think now and design later, hence reversing their initial temptation to grab a computer instead of a pencil.”

As someone who teaches interactive media and has run a digital media programme, this gets the biggest of big cheers from me. Learning how to use the tools is important, but not at the expense of the idea. Coming up with ideas and putting your creativity up for criticism isn’t easy. Sometimes it can be soul destroying. But it is part of the process in whatever creative field you are working in.

Over my own years of teaching I have observed two reasons why students cling to the software. The first is that they often mistakenly think it is what will make them money when they leave. That’s true to a certain extent, but there are thousands of other people out there who know how to use Photoshop just as there are millions who can use a pencil. In fact, many people can use Photoshop spectacularly badly.

The second reason is because software skills are something solid and graspable whilst personal, creative development is mushy and scary. It need not be software – there are plenty of people obsessing over the perfect lens or sketchbook. When it feels like you have no ideas and are creatively all at sea, that filter menu in Photoshop looks like an attractive lifebelt, but it can just as easily be a lead weight.

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The Advertising Concept Book is designed primarily for students (and teachers) and provides a well-structured and complete course on advertising, including several exercises that students can try. The book works through the entire process from basic tools, to strategy and campaign executions across all media – print, TV, ambient, interactive, radio and integrated campaigns.

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Saying the book is for students is selling it short. Given some of the terrible advertising that bombards my poor eyeballs every day, there are plenty of advertising and marketing professionals that would get a great deal out of this book. Every new recruit should be given a copy as part of their induction process, perhaps then we’d see some improvement.

“Over time you will become critical of many ads, even awards winners [...] Once you start to look at ads properly, it won’t be long before you’ll be wincing with embarrassment as you look back at the ads that you thought were good.”

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Although Barry describes the various roles in advertising, he avoids prioritising art direction or copywriting and points out that this partnership is a blend of skills that overlap and complement each other to create the best ideas. The “think now, design now” mantra remains a consistent focus throughout the book.

The Advertising Concept Book takes all the best parts of fifty years’ worth of awards annuals and, along with the rough comps, adds Barry’s accompanying wisdom, which is both engaging and enlightening. His years of experience – first as an art director at Ogilvy in London and since 2000 as a copywriter in New York and a teacher at Syracuse University – have not gone to waste.

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My father had an advertising agency for many years, which left me pretty cynical about the industry. Yet, I found the book much more engaging than I expected and read it in detail from cover to cover. Some of the approaches to generating ideas have helped me with some recent small projects and certainly sharpened my own creative thinking.

If there is a criticism it is that is that the less classical advertising areas (such as interactive) don’t go into as much detail as I would have liked. This is probably a little unfair because Barry makes it clear from the start that the book is really about straight advertising and I’m being picky because interactive is my own area. (Actually a piece of work for Levi’s by Antirom appears in the book, so I can’t complain).

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If you’re a student you should definitely steal buy this book and if you are involved in teaching design and media, you should buy three copies, one for you and two for your institution’s library. If you are a professional in advertising and are wondering why you haven’t yet won any awards, buy The Advertising Concept Book and you might find out why.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying The Advertising Concept Book from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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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 and curious”? Exactly.

So, what can one say about another magazine in such a crowded marketplace? Although it is hard to tell just from the first issue, UPPERCASE differs from most glossy design magazines by ferreting out the small, but interesting people out there building little creative niches for themselves. People who come up with an interesting idea and actually go out and make it happen.

UPPERCASE is put together by Janine Vangool who opened the UPPERCASE gallery in Calgary in 2005 and Deidre Martin a writer, curator and teacher (hiding behind her creation in the opening photo). Since the opening of the gallery, they have also expanded into publishing books and paper goods. The blog has been collecting the creatively curious for some time, so creating a magazine seems like a natural extension.

Most of the people profiled have a mix of a strong online presence connected to the physical world of making actual things. As a digital guy, I’m always impressed by people who can create wonderful objects without chiselling off their fingers.

Julie and Kathryn from perfectbound create small still-life dioramas from their daily aesthetic travels, photograph them and place them on their blog. Jordan Provost and Jason Wong are Enormous Champion, a Brooklyn-based duo (of course) who specialise in beautiful letterpress printed stationery.

Also profiled is Karyn Valino, who runs The Workroom “Toronto’s first sew & craft by the hour space”. Recognising that many people might want to get creative with craft materials but might not have them, nor a sewing machine and space to hand, she set up a fully equipped studio space that has been a great success.

I can’t list all the contributors and profiles, but a few other favourites are Glen Dresser’s essay on the remarkable history of the humble screw, Heini Koskinen’s gorgeous vintage wardrobe re-mixing and Blanca Gómez’s illustration that graces the cover of the first issue.

You know the friend whose apartment decor is a perfect mix of carefully considered design classics with a few casually quirky objects? The one you’re always jealous of for their ability to effortlessly make the place look cool yet unpretentious. That’s UPPERCASE magazine.

UPPERCASE has a very contemporary feel about its content – it’s as if someone took all the best bits of great blogs and printed them up beautifully on good, weighty stock. This can, of course, go both ways. The writing is sometimes a little casual and bloggy in tone, but it usually suits the subject.

The only thing I’d like to see a little more balanced are the question-answer style interviews. Sometimes it’s more engaging to read an edited, descriptive profile of a designer or studio with a few quotes rather than a simple Q&A.

These are minor niggles, though. If Leonardo were alive today, he would almost certainly be blogging his exploits (in-between building iPhone apps) and his magazine of choice would be the neo-Renaissance UPPERCASE. I heartily recommend you go an buy a copy yourself.

As with any magazine, the challenge will be to see whether they can keep the standard high, but with the amount of amazing Etsy stores out there, it seems they will have no shortage of material.

I’m giving it four stars for now and besides they sent me a bookmark, which I always need.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

(All images are copyright Janine Vangool and plundered with permission from her Flickr set)

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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 kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850,” wrote Wolfe. “They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour – everything is right there.”

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Bayley’s opening essay is as insightful as it is well-researched and traces the parallel developments of automobile design culture in the USA and Europe. He opens with, “this is not a book about cars”. Not in the sense of their power or speed or any other technical details. This is a book that luxuriates in the the power of design and of the generations of automotive designers who designed these objects that, in turn, inspired the rest of us. Here the car is an artform, “our age’s singular contribution to cultural history.”

“The ‘57 Chevrolet Bel Air is as least as interesting as a ‘57 David Smith… with the added significance that it sold more. No formula exists to calculate aesthetic impact, but my feeling is that the Chevy – in the general scheme of things – outperforms the gallery sculpture.”

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The story is not only about the cars, but the personalities behind them. Car designers are seldom known outside of their own sphere, a curiosity given their mass production and appeal. I would wager more people would recognise the name of Philippe Stark than J Mays or Freeman Thomas (the designers of the Audi TT).

From Ford’s relentless drive (sorry…) towards ever-increasing efficiency to the enormous, curvy opulence of GM’s cars under Harley Earl, the car gave birth to many of the modern notions of industrial design – a contribution often excluded from Bauhaus-laden design histories.

“Without books to teach them, car designers have learnt a potent formal language: how one radius can convey strength, another weakness. They learn also about meaningful detail, the psychology of colour, proportion and the way light falls on surfaces. And they pass on these lessons to consumers.

“Car designers learn to work within astonishing constraints, not just of technology, but of aesthetics, too. There is only a few millimetres’ difference, Jaguar designer Geoff Lawson once explained, between a curve that is fat and a curve that is anorexic.”

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GM’s Chairman, Alfred Sloan, pondered in the ’20s whether ‘appearance’ might be a way of selling more cars. But it was Earl who gave birth to the notion of ‘Styling’ when he renamed his still fresh “Art and Color” department.

“Earl’s distinctive achievement,” writes Bayley, “was to appreciate the structural significance of design and to institutionalize it.”

“He invented the practices still used today: concept cars shown at spectacular presentations called ‘Motoramas’, clay modelling, platform sharing and brand separation. He called design ‘thinking out loud’ and insisted that the designer’s role was to give the customer a ‘visual receipt’.”

Raymond Loewy, ‘the Father of Modern Industrial Design’ (and who also designed the Shell logo) understood the need for car designers to lead the public’s taste with his MAYA – “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable – principle. Enough of a dream, but pulled back from the bleeding edge with enough space for next year’s model.

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Across the pond (where the technology of the car was invented by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians) there was also plenty happening. Bayley drools over the Citroën DS – “the single greatest automobile design of all time” and smirks at the phallic form of the Jaguar E-Type – the first mass produced car to be exhibited at MoMA in New York.

There are plenty of anecdotes, egos and intrigues, whether it is Roy E. Brown saying, “I have so much talent, it frightens me” or Bayley’s quip that Enzo Ferrari’s “intractable ego and monumental conviction of self-worth could not be accommodated in anybody else’s corporate structure”.

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The main book itself is classic car porn. Each selected car gets its own centrefold with a following spread of details, all beautifully photographed by Tif Hunter, who took a tent with him around the world to photograph them all in the same environment. Each earns a paragraph of pithy historical and critical analysis from Bayley.

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All the classic supercars, Cadillacs and vintages you might imagine are in there plus some surprises and some oddities, such as the Nissan Cube – a car I hold to be the ugliest of all time. The smart makes an appearance and it’s entertaining to flip between the pages of it and the Mini or Fiat 500. The line-up ends with the shark-fin BMW 5 from 2003 – a car I regularly see on the autobahns here in Germany, usually in my rearview mirror closing in at 240km/h and flashing their lights.

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Some people bristle from Bayley’s tendency to be either a highly entertaining, knowledgeable guide or a cocky know-it-all (who else puts a quote on their own web site that they were ‘once described as the second most intelligent man in Britain’?) But I have admired his mix of intelligent critique and wit since reading General Knowledge that I stole borrowed from a friend some years ago.

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Cars is a gorgeous book. It’s worth buying for the production – velveteen cover and library-grade slipcase – and the photography alone. Bayley’s essay and analysis add up to something much more – a eulogy for the car as we have known it.

I can’t feel sad about this, the time has come and I already feel a revulsion at the site of a Hummer’s ugly, blunt obscenity even whilst admiring the enormous cruise ships of cars from 50s Americana. The difference between the two is the consciousness of the age in which they were designed (and that the Hummer lacks any grace).

But transport will and must change and the car with it. I sit writing this in Germany where the car industry is reeling from the financial crisis and Opal looks set to be dragged under by its mother company, GM – both of whom have been making uninspired cars that nobody wants for far too long. Change is fuel for innovation.

It seems likely, however, that we will never see the combination of the thrill of riding a galloping horse combined with the adventure of a rocket ship in the car again. Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything is large enough to make a beautiful tombstone for a dying era of design.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Cars by Stephen Bayley
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Conran Octopus Ltd.

You can buy Steven Bayley’s Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) and The Designer’s Review of Books store.

[Update on the US release: Octopus will be publishing a pocket sized version of the book in May and then the larger version of the book (the one I reviewed) in November. You can still buy the book from anywhere in the world through the Octopus web site.]

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“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: High Touch Visuals, is a reminder of the pleasure of the physical. Tangible is the third in a series of books starting with Hidden Track: How Visual Culture Is Going Places (2005) and Tactile: High Touch Visuals (2007) and explores the trend towards designers creating dioramas, sculptures and other physical environments. Naturally, object and interior designers and architects have always worked with three dimensions, but many of us spend an extraordinary amount of time awash in a world of pure pixels.

It is no accident that this movement (re)started in the early 2000s. After the dotcom crash many of my friends and colleagues saw their work simply disappear. Quite apart from turning up to work only to be met by bailiffs padlocking the doors and changing server passwords, many of their clients vanished overnight. The websites they had toiled over vanished with them, sometimes without so much as a screenshot to remember them by.

Whilst kicking their heels in a flooded freelance market, many of them turned to making physical objects, such as vinyl toys or interactive devices. Somewhere in the midst of what we can create in the digital world lurks an innate desire to make things that can be touched, smelled and turned in the hand. Russell Davies summed it up well a year ago:

I suspect it’s my unconscious telling me that I’m not equipped for the world we’re going to be living in. My core skill is probably using PowerPoint to persuade people and businesses to do their advertising slightly differently. That’s an increasingly abstract and useless thing. Because, however the future turns out it seems like a knowledge of the thinginess of things is going to be important.

Tangible is a book about those things. It divided into sections covering areas such as hand-built graphic design, extending the human body and public intervention. Not all of the examples fit neatly into these categories and they are fairly loosely applied.

Some of my favourites are in the Out of the Box chapter, which covers hand-built graphic design. Some of them are installations that are either standalone pieces or photographed for use in print. Others are physical interactive works such as Jessica Nebel’s Pixel It – a poster with individual flaps that can be pulled down to customize its ‘pixels’.

(Jessica Nebel’s Pixel It – click to enlarge)

Slinkachu’s wonderful Little People works feature in the Imitation and Mimicry section, but could happily sit in the Public Interventions:

(Slinkachu’s Snail Graff – click to enlarge)

On the Altered Identities front, there are some excellent camouflage works by Desiree Palmen and Emma Hack, but I loved the stylishness of Christian Tagliavini’s Dame di Cartone series:

(Dame di Cartone – click to enlarge)

The Spatial Compositions chapter covers works that blur the art/design divide. Many are installations in gallery environments, intended to be interacted with, touched, walk around and upon. Others are also installations to be photographed, easily the best of which are Katrin Schacke’s editorial shoots for Stanley magazine.

(Katrin Schacke’s photography for Stanley – click to enlarge)

Featured in the Public Interventions chapter are works that make you stop, look, stare and sometimes interact. These include the now infamous coin installation Obsessions Make My Life Worse and My Life Better from Stefan Sagmeister and the clever plastic bag animals of Joshua Allen Harris.

The book is typically well-researched, designed and produced by the Gestalten team and it is a great collection of this growing trend. A sense of playfulness is what comes across strongest of all. It is a reminder of how good it is to get your hands dirty once in a while, so stop reading this, get off your computer and go and make something.

Gestalten.tv also has a video interview with Julien Vallée who created the cover and chapter plates for the book.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying Tangible: High Touch Visuals from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

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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 Dr. Woohoo’s In The Mod and because Gutierrez de la Roza has created a set of Rolodex cards for each palette, which seemed to be an almost quaint touch in a digital world. On closer inspection, An Eye for Color has more to it than just some nice palettes. Gutierrez de la Roza’s main aim is to help you do it yourself:

“Developing your own eye for color does not necessarily come naturally. Just as an athlete trains his body for a marathon, so must you train your eye and mind to perfect your use of color.”

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Physically the book is bound with a thick board cover of the children’s book variety and feels like the kind of thing that could be put to regular use in a busy studio without much wear and tear. On the design front I found the ever-changing typography a little irritating and the layouts often felt a bit crowded, but the sections and flow are clear enough. And, yes, seeing the palettes on paper is more pleasant that viewing them on screen.

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Some designers, like Veerle Peters, seem to have an instinctual knack for colour combinations. Having worked digitally for a very long time, I find myself faced with such a large range of colour choice that choosing an ideal combination seems impossible. It’s a classic example of The Paradox of Choice.

My eyes and mind need the aforementioned training and it is here that An Eye for Color trumps the online, on-screen tools like Kuler. Sure, you can upload your own images to Kuler and let it automagically create a colour palette from it, but it doesn’t tell you much about why that palette works or not, nor does it provide any context.

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Drawing upon a range of source images Gutierrez de la Roza analyses everything from artists such as Degas, Rothko, Kandinsky, Hokusai and Warhol through to photographs, prints and collages. Her descriptions contain all sorts of nuggets of interesting information about the image or artist as well as her own analysis of the colour palette. For example, there is apparently no official reason why the Continental Congress chose the colours they did for the American flag in 1777 – they were only attributed meanings five years later.

I also appreciated Milton Glaser’s honesty when discussing his method: “I don’t think about the colors I am going to use. I just use whatever I feel like using.” I can hear the sound of design students high-fiving all over the world.

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This intuitive approach to colour use is the paradox of An Eye for Color or, indeed, any other book on colour. It avoids getting bogged down in colour theory (which might be a negative for some) and is certainly a more practical studio resource than Kelvin: Colour Today. But in the end you need to develop your own Glaser intuition and not simply lift it from Gutierrez de la Roza or anyone else. On the other hand, An Eye for Color does show you the way to get started and gives you a good reason to dust of the Rolodex.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Buy An Eye for Color from Amazon.com
, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

Look out for the final review in our Three Books on Colour series – Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette.

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