Who can resist a book that provides a paper doll of Saul Bass?
Jam-packed, whirlwind, and charming are the three best words to describe_ A History of Graphic Design for Rainy Days_ from Gestalten Press.
Prepare for this review to become rather meta. Gestalten’s Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Booksis 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.
[Naïve - Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) is a recent release from Gestalten, edited by Robert Klanten and Hendrik Hellige. It explores the “extraordinary renaissance of Classic Modernism, from the 1940s to 1960s, in contemporary graphic design” and collects together the work of many of the contemporary designers working in this style today.
“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.
Books on colour must be the new black. We were sent two in a row recently – Kelvin: Colour Todayand An Eye for Color. We decided to do a series over the next month or two and include Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette.
If there is one resource we’re not short of these days it is data. We’re swimming in the stuff and generating it all the time. Making visual sense of all that data requires a fine balance between complexity and simplicity.
