I have been delaying reviewing User Design’s – aka Thomas Bohm’s – series of self-published illustrated books, The journey of larks, Life and Punctuation..?. Partly this has been a lack of time, but partly it is because I’m not quite sure where to situate them. I’ll take each book in turn:

The journey of larks

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The journey of larks is a play on collective nouns: “a failing of students,” “a snooze of lectures,” “an incredulity of cuckolds,” and so on, each with a matching illustration. Some of them are amusing, like “a wince of dentists,” others simply baffling, such as, “a gang of elks.” Is that funny? I’m not sure I get the reference.

Life

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Life is billed as “a pure picture lead book (no text) story about one day in the life of somebody.” It is set in a kind of mixed “Denglish” – German and English – landscape, with Aldi and Tesco featuring back-to-back, It’s kind of charming in its banality, but soon flipped through.

Punctuation..?

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Punctuation..? is by far the best one of the three. It is yet another book on punctuation. Apostrophes, commas, brackets, etc., form the bulk, but there are some nice cultural additions, such as Guillemets («these») and the Interpunct (a dot between words used in latin・texts・like・this). Unlike most books on grammar and punctation, this one is friendly rather than curt and preachy and the ideas are illustrated in the Bohm’s style.

Bohm’s illustration style is what I would describe as “naïve mousework”. I have no idea if he draws on paper and scans it in, uses a tablet and stylus or the mouse, but it has the feel of a child drawing on the computer for the first time with the mouse. I do not mean this condescendingly. It is what it is, but is not particularly my taste. I blame myself here – and years of being taught to “draw realistically” in school – for this lack of appeal to my senses, but I can see that others will like this. In its style, it is well done, with a decent amount of character and wit. The naïve style belies the skill in knowing what to leave out and simplify.

Physically, each one is a 30-35 page affair, printed on high quality, cream, heavy 160gsm paper in near A5 format. The covers are 350gsm and both papers are from Antalis McNaughton. As self-published books go, they feel good in the hand and appropriate to the artistic content between the pages.

So, where to situate them? Illustration? Writing? A bit of both or neither? I’m not sure it matters. I suspect the target market for these books are people looking for a gift for someone. They are not the kind of books that you will find in every bookshop and you will be supporting an independent, self-publishing effort, which I think is a good thing.

You can buy the books directly from User Design’s site or via Amazon: The journey of larks (Amazon), Life (Amazon) and Punctuation..? (Amazon).

About the Reviewer

Andy Polaine is the founder, publisher and now editor-at-large of The Designer’s Review of Books. Apart from that, he is a service designer, writer, lecturer and researcher. He is co-writing a book on service design soon to be published by Rosenfeld Media. You can find his other musings on his own site or as @apolaine on Twitter.

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Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro

You are not doing design, you are selling design, which is a valuable service. If you don’t want to charge for your services, you can pick up Design Is a Hobby on aisle three of Michael’s between the balsa wood and yarn.

This quote from Design Is a Job is exactly the type of statement you can expect from someone who describes himself as “Designer, Artist, Assh*le”, and who once gave a presentation at San Francisco CreativeMornings called “F*ck You. Pay Me.”

Mike Monteiro is also extremely well qualified to write about the job of design. He is the design director of Mule Design, an interactive design studio that he co-founded along with Erika Hall over 10 years ago. He may have “started his career by making logos in thirty minutes for a copy shop in Austin, without prior qualifications”, as Erik Spiekermann points out in the book’s foreword, but since then he has become a highly successful, professional designer with an impressive client list that includes Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal and a number of admirable non-profits.

Monteiro is very clear about why he wrote Design Is a Job.

I am tired of you not getting paid. I am tired of you working nights and weekends. I am tired of you doing spec work because someone has convinced you it will look good in your portfolio. I am tired of you sitting by and hoping the work sells itself. So I wrote you a book. It has a spine and by the time you’re done reading so will you.

Like all the A Book Apart books, it’s short, and Monteiro doesn’t waste any time getting to the point. In 137 pages he covers the following: choosing the right clients, charging for your work, working with contracts, sticking to your process, getting your money, and more. You can read the preview chapter on getting clients, online.

It’s also a good read. I ordered it the day it came out, and read it that afternoon. Monteiro has a very direct but warm writing style which makes the book accessible and authentic. He’s humble, he knows what he’s talking about and he doesn’t bullsh*t. It’s refreshing.

I’ve been freelancing for several years and some of the information I had already implemented. Monteiro has an entire chapter on working with contracts. It covers why you should have one, the importance of having a good lawyer, and what contracts should contain. The only thing I can add is that having a great lawyer and a great contract is important for negotiating with clients, because it gives you a lot of confidence in the way you are conducting your business.

Other information can never be stated often enough. Monteiro devotes a chapter to charging for your work.

If you can stand in front of a client completely confident and explain why you are worth the amount you quoted, you should charge it. The problem with designers isn’t that they don’t know how much to charge; it’s that they’re afraid to charge it!

The chapter doesn’t include any specific rate guidelines, but it’s so full of useful information that I could probably just quote this entire chapter. And I can tell you that the first thing I did after reading Design Is a Job is raise my rates.

Possibly the most practical information in the book is on presenting design. Monteiro argues throughout the book that design is a service and that designers, while being qualified professionals that solve problems, are also sales people. A big part of the job is presenting the work to the client.

Stop trying to get your clients to “understand design” and instead show them that you understand what they hired you to do. Explain how the choices you’ve made lead to a successful project. This isn’t magic, it’s math. Show your work. Don’t hope someone “gets it,” and don’t blame them if they don’t— convince them.

The book doesn’t fail to inspire. Monteiro stresses the importance of doing the job of design in a way that is ethical and that you can be proud of. It’s one of the things that makes freelancing, or running your own design business so rewarding. Monteiro chooses his clients very carefully. Even though there is always a bottom line to consider, he manages to somehow do what he loves, be well paid for it and leave the world a better place. Design Is a Job is a how-to manual for that life. A must read.

Publisher

Design Is a Job by Mike Monteiro is published by A Book Apart. 137 pages. Available in paperback, ePub, PDF, and mobi

About the Reviewer

Shannon Smith is Web designer and developer and founder of Café Noir Design. You can find her blog at Chroni.ca. She lives and works in Montreal. Google+ | Twitter

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Newly minted Editor, Dominic Flask, surveys his kingdom. Or visits a gallery.

Regular readers will know that they haven’t had all that much to regularly read recently. I started The Designer’s Review of Books as a labour of love a few years ago, but a combination of writing my own book, having a young child and holding down a day job have meant I haven’t been able to push the site as far as I would like in recent months.

I didn’t want to just let the site die out or shut it down, so I’m really pleased to announce that long-time Designer’s Review of Books contributor Dominic Flask will be taking over as Editor. Unfortunately he didn’t pay me $1 billion for it, but you can’t have everything.

I’m remaining as the publisher of the site and have taken on the spurious title of Editor-at-large, which essentially means I’ll write when I can and still be involved. The tweets from the site will still go out under my @apolaine account. We have some plans for the site, including interviews with authors, shorter, quick reviews and more, so keep following and keep reading!

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Organic is the second release from the London-based Kapitza studio, run by sisters Nicole and Petra Kapitza. The book is 224 pages filled with colorful patterns inspired by the Kapitzas’ love of chance and randomness in the natural world. The patterns, which range in shape and scale, demonstrate a playfulness with color, layering and proportion. Organic is a paperback volume, handsomely printed on a soft, uncoated paper which makes the book a delight to handle.

In his introduction to Organic, Simon Thorogood gives readers some insight on the Kapitzas’ source of inspiration:

“In nature, it might be the smooth tactility of a pebble, the spread of petals on a flower, the shimmering flow of a stream, fissures on the bark of a tree, the crystalline forms of ice, or surface soil pellets left by tunneling earthworms…”

The Kaptizas’ process for creating Organic began with hand-rendered drawings of irregular structures found in both their natural and man-made environment. Then, based on these drawings, the Kapitzas made a series of fonts in order to digitally produce their patterns.

Creatives working in the fields of illustration, graphic design, fashion or textiles might find a source of inspiration in Organic. For those who want to incorporate the Kaptizas’ patterns into design projects, there are a few available options. Nicole and Petra included a CD of pattern fonts with their first book release, Geometric. While no disk accompanies Organic, some of the pattern fonts that Kapitza developed for the book, such as Orbit, can be purchased on the Kapitza web site. Designers can also license the patterns by contacting Kapitza directly.

Publisher Information

Organic was self-published by Kaptiza. It can be purchased at kapitza.com.

About the Reviewer

Aggie Toppins is an adjunct faculty member and an MFA candidate in graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is passionate about making work that helps people share their stories. Aggie lives in Baltimore with her husband Jason and their basset hound Jolly.

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Review by Veronica Grow

Like most typo cognoscenti, Stephen Banham is fondly known for being somewhat fanatical and nerdy on the subject of type and letters. In my opinion, it takes the obsession of one such fanatic to compile such a vast treasure of information, so clearly, in the form of this fascinating book named Characters. Characters focuses on the cultural role that typography plays (especially in the guise of signage) in defining the flavor and character of the City of Melbourne, Australia. Banham states that it is his intention to “offer a new way of looking at the familiar”.

Banham, who comes from Melbourne, has quite a weighty reputation as an authority on the topic of typography. Baseline magazine, Emigre, Adbusters, Face, Typo, Eye and Monument are just a few of the publications to which he has contributed on the subject. His body of work over the last 17 years has provided valuable commentary and insight into the changing nature of graphic design and typography as a cultural phenomenon.

The book is engaging because essentially it is the story of Melbourne told through pictures and anecdotes of its signage. And Banham really knows how to tell a good story by focusing not only on the quirky and unusual, but also the minutia of detail. Often when I was reading Characters I saw parallels to my enjoyable reading of More Please by Barry Humphries that tells his story of growing up in Melbourne in the 1950s. But Banham was not around in the fifties and sixties and so deserves respect for the many lonely years of research and interviews that he has compiled, unearthing dozens of stories and hundreds of pictures included in the book.

I enjoyed the interviews with everyday folk who talk about constructing signage, and their memories and evocations caused by well known but now vanished neon landmarks. We should thank Banham for recording the stories of the everyday, for they are the very valuable cultural fabric of a city now lost forever. One such story is that of Ian ‘Podgy’ Rogers, the Neon maintenance man who worked on the Craven A Filter sign:

“Craven A Filter was one of the largest roadside signs ever made. It was just over the Princes Bridge at the start of the railway. Had over 800 bloody globes in it. Late one night I was working on it and I was that bloody tired. Rang my missus and said, ‘I won’t be home tonight. I’m going to sleep with this Sheila called Craven A. She’s cravin’ for me.’ She asked where I was and I said, ‘I’m sitting up in the sign above the Yarra River and I’ve got about an hour of work to do. I’ll have a sleep here tonight.’ So I crawled into the corner, put my toolbag under my head and didn’t wake up until eight the next morning.

Podgy is one quintessentially Australian character who helps give the book its flavor. Banham goes on to recount many more stories, ideas and themes in the book (53 in all), making it valuable for anyone who is interested in the shaping of the identity of cities. I like his plain, clear and accessible writing, which lends an authenticity to the book.

Thought provoking historical photographs profoundly demonstrate the significant change of many well-known landmarks in Melbourne. I have to say I felt a sad nostalgia for my childhood when I skipped through the book, reminded of the rich visual language and character that Melbourne and my home city of Adelaide have lost. Today they have been transformed into just other cities in our international landscape, with few distinct local features.

If you are a practicing Graphic Designer, Town Planner, Architect or Place Maker, the book will help you gain greater depth and understanding of how type and lettering define the vernacular style of a city. For the Graphic Design student, Characters will enable you to understand the relevance of your practice as someone who shapes our culture. The ideas and notions within the book hold valuable teaching project reference and ideas for Communication Design lecturers, who I believe should be creating project briefs that centre on the same topic. The book would make a wonderful gift, being a valuable reference for the many years to come.

–

Characters: Cultural stories revealed through typography by Stephen Banham is a joint publication by Thames and Hudson and The State Library of Victoria. You can purchase it on Amazon (US|UK) or find it directly in The Designer’s Review of Books Amazon store.

About the reviewer

Veronica Grow is from Old School the New School for Design in Melbourne, Australia. She is an ethnographer, illustrator, publisher, graphic designer and educator who is interested in telling stories with pictures and social design. You can follow her on Twitter under @oldschoolthenew.

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If you are a fan of minimalism, modernism or brutalism you will find Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography especially intriguing. The book, by J. Namdev Hardisty, surveys contemporary examples of the styles by detailing the work of many modern design studios. Many of the studios were familiar names in the design world, some were more foreign but still recognizable, and many were names I had not encountered before.

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The emphasis is, of course, on typography and the book showcases the typographic work of 24 separate design entities. The author gives an overview of each studio, which usually contains small portions of their history, practice, and beliefs. The short excerpts are followed by several examples of the work produced by the studio being presented.

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More often than not, the description relates directly to the pieces shown giving you a good idea of exactly what Hadisty is presenting.

Projects like the Kelly 1:1 art installation, the John&Paul&Ringo&George T-shirt, the Stedelijk Museum CS identity system, and a slew of posters for various themed exhibitions have showcased the group’s talent for creating profound graphic works from simple concepts that also propogate their bold, almost Pop Art, take on Modernism.

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The layout of the book is clean and straightforward, complementing the work and information on its pages. Mixed in between the studio showcases are several interviews relevant to the styles of modernism and brutalism. The interviews help break up the studio showcases, which I appreciated as I sometimes struggled to remember the distinctions between the similar bodies of work.

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Even though some of the work overlapped between the different studios the range of styles presented gives a thorough overview of the evolution of modernism and Swiss typography in present day design culture. Hardisty does an excellent job of being as thorough and exhaustive in his exploration of the styles and the samples of work are as inspiring as his dedication.

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In the introduction Hardisty valiantly tries to assure you that this is not your normal book on typography, modernism or minimalism. While I do not wholeheartedly agree that the book breaks entirely away from the norms, it is certainly a refreshing approach to a bold style of typographic design.

I Heart Design is published by Princeton Architectural Press and you can purchase it 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 view his design portfolio here, his place of work here, and his in progress work here.

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Photo: Marc Wathieu on Flickr.

Over the past year or so I’ve been getting a pretty high spam to real comment ratio on The Designer’s Review of Books, some of which are attempts to hack the blog install. So, in line with quite a few others, I have decided to turn off comments on the DRoB. Old comments should still be present, but you’ll no longer be able to post new ones.

It’s not an easy decision, because I like good discussion and dialogue, but much of this happens on people’s own blogs or via Twitter these days. By all means drop us a line if you would like to get in touch or send me a tweet.

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This isn’t your typical sketchbook. Robin Landa, Professor of Design at Kean University in New Jersey, collaborated with some of the nation’s top creative experts to bring readers a brainstorm session in the form of a journal. Contributors include Rick Valicenti of 3st, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, and design critic Jessica Helfand, among other well-known artists and designers. “Consider this journal your creativity coach or personal exploratory zone sans pressure,” Landa writes in the introduction. Seattle’s Modern Dog Co. designed the book.

Take a Line for a Walk (available from Amazon: US|UK|DE ) is divided into 103 prompts — mostly blank pages with short directives — and nine longer projects. Landa’s intent: to give readers “a space to play in new ways.” The idea is that readers will use the prompts and projects to expand their ability to think creatively. Landa writes:

“The more you conceive and sketch, the more your thinking evolves.”

Prompts invite readers to free associate visually or verbally directly in the journal. Some prompts are conceptual, such as the one found on page 14, a contribution by Steven Doloff, Professor of Humanities & Media Studies at Pratt:

“You’re an inventor. Your invention is the size of a toaster.
What can it do?”

Other prompts ask the reader to explore form making. Jessalyn Lambert, who recently graduated from Kean University with her BFA, gives clear instructions on page 91: “Place a bunch of dots randomly on the paper. Then connect them. What do you see?”

Some prompts are seemingly introspective, yet they relate to the professional experience of the contributing designer. “Describe yourself using only six carefully chosen words,” suggests veteran brand identity designer Bart Crosby on page 58, “Then create a single symbol or illustration that represents the combination of all those words.”

Landa includes a series of projects to complement the prompts. Projects are more involved exercises that demand additional time and materials. Project II, for example, is a contribution by new media artist and Florida State University Professor Gail Rubini: “Collect 10 objects and attach/glue them together in an interesting way.”

Project III comes from Pentagram Partner Michael Bierut. He contributed to the book by offering an assignment he gives his graphic design students at Yale University:

“Do a design operation that you are capable of repeating every day for 100 days…The medium is open.”

You don’t have to be a designer or an artist to enjoy Take a Line for a Walk. Anyone in need of a creative jumpstart may find its pages stimulating. The best part? All you need is a pencil to start playing. No prior experience required.

Publisher Information

Take a Line For a Walk was published by Wadsworth Cengage Learning in July 2011.

You can support The Designer’s Review of Books by buying Take a Line For a Walk from Amazon (US|UK|DE ) or The Designer’s Review of Books Amazon store.

About the Reviewer

Aggie Toppins is an adjunct faculty member and an MFA candidate in graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is passionate about making work that helps people share their stories. Aggie lives in Baltimore with her husband Jason and their basset hound Jolly.

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A nice little book from Magpie Studios honoring the postmen and women – in the UK we say “posties” – who are working so hard at this time of year (we hope):

At some point growing up, we stop listening out for sleigh bells and start listening for door bells. Our Santa still wears red, still fights the elements and the clock, still strives to deliver Christmas joy. Here’s to the humble postie.

Working with photographer John Angerson, this year’s card is a celebration of often-overlooked doorbell-pushing heroes. A portraiture book of our locals, printed on postcard weight paper and bound with the postman’s unassuming red rubber band.

It’s actually their Christmas card to all their collaborators and clients this year, but maybe if you get in touch or send them a tweet and say something nice they’ll send you one too.

My posties in Germany seem to be laden with Amazon.com boxes at the moment. One guy reckoned about 60% of their deliveries are from Amazon at the moment. While we’re at it, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you out there in designer book land.

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“Designers are the mediators of our daily experience. The easier my compost bucket is to use, the more appealing my reusable grocery bag, the more likely I am to participate in environmentally sound practices. Designers carry a heavy responsibility, but at the same time they can offer our future the greatest gift.”

So says Gavin Newsom, current Lt. Governor of California and former Mayor of San Francisco, setting the tone for Just Design, Socially Conscious Design for Critical Causes (Amazon: US|UK|DE). The book is written by Christopher Simmons, a designer, educator, and founder of MINE, a San Francisco design studio. It is emphatically optimistic and offers a comprehensive compendium of inspiring work, relevant to any designer interested in social design. Simmons presents the current state of social design through a curated collection of projects and interviews by leaders in the field.

The breadth of work is impressive and it clearly showcases the spirit of socially conscious work. The interviews and essays highlight designers and educators who are passionate, smart, and committed to their responsibility.

Just Design observes current themes in social design by presenting the book in seven parts: Supporting, Seeking, Organizing, Teaching, Reacting, Celebrating. Supporting presents projects designed by individuals who collaborate with established organizations. Teaching, features leading educators who are creating new programs in this area, as well as projects from social design classes. In essence, each chapter theme functions as a framework to curate projects.

But the book falls short of giving readers tools or pragmatic advice to incorporate into their own practice. And much of the book celebrates pro bono work created by firms who may have the extra resources to use or educational institutions that build social design projects into their curriculum. A solution to this could be a series of How To’s for readers to explore, for example, 5 steps on how to engage with the community you’re working with. Furthermore, the book could attempt to define a set of Best Practices for the area of Social Design to follow and build on as it evolves.

The most encouraging interviews describe realistic ways to do socially conscious work. Randy J. Hunt of Citizen Scholar in Brooklyn, describes how he balances his own studio while working full time as the Interaction Design Director at Etsy.com:

“These roles, in addition to the studio’s client work, self-initiated work, writing, consulting, and other design-related activities add up to a complete and sustaining experience, both professionally and personally.”

He reinforces the importance of working with people you like, “It tends to be that the people I enjoy being around share a similar sense of responsibility when it comes to their work and how it should enter the world.” The interviews and essays offer a multitude of perspectives that allow the reader to form their own ideas of what socially conscious design means to them and where they fit in.

But process is missing.

Social design tends to focus on the user or the audience and the design with the most impact typically looks to the user to help develop a solution. Process is paramount and Just Design overlooks this. With such a diverse range of work, the process behind each project could begin to show us insights as to what approaches works best in particular situations.

Aaris Sherin, author and professor at St. John’s University, offers salient advice to young designers who are interested in social design. She argues that making information clearer to an audience is one of the most overlooked areas of values-based design work. She goes on to offer a list of ideas for becoming a rock-star designer for good. The first idea simply being: Ask yourself, “What are my strengths?” Once identified, look for opportunities based on those attributes.

Overall, the case studies present a diverse range of work from the Polling Place Photo Project by Winterhouse Studio, to smaller collaborations like Freedom of the Press, a self-initiated newsprint publication, by Brian Ponto and Lindsay Ballant. Social design continues to broaden its scope by encompassing anything from community engaged projects to information design. But some of the projects are undecidedly socially conscious. For example, Ox-Bow school of art artists’ residency brochure or California College of Arts’ Architecture Lecture Series posters are not overtly ‘doing good’. As a reader, you can decide for yourself where to draw the line, or if there should even be a distinction. The title, Just Design, alludes to this, as Simmons states, “Whether for greater good or greater profit, it’s all just design.”

Just Design, Socially Conscious Design for Critical Causes is published by HOW Books. You can support the Designer’s Review of Books by ordering from Amazon (US|UK|DE). If you found this review helpful, you can support The Designer’s Review of Books by purchasing from our Amazon store.

About the reviewer

Christina Beard is a graphic designer, writer, and sailing enthusiast. She is currently exploring the role of digital media in wayfinding and defining strategies to create better experiences at Two Twelve. Follow me on twitter @christinabeard.

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