Or to give it it’s full title: Detail In Typography, Letters, Letter spacing, words, word spacing, lines, line spacing, columns. (Amazon UK US)

Detail in Typography… is one of the more recent publications by Hyphen Press, the imprint set up by Robin Kinross; typographer, author & critic. Published for the first time in English in 2008, Detail in Typography… was first published in Switzerland in 2005 and it’s translation to English has given this slim book a much deserved wider audience.

Detail in Typography… is not just a guide to making clear & legible text. Hochuli also discusses what makes an aesthetically pleasing layout, and why layouts can still appear dull even after all the ‘rules’ have been strictly adhered to.

Covering all the elements which make up a column of text the book is split into the following chapters: The reading process, The letter, The word, The line, Line spacing & the column and The qualities of type. This segregation gives Detail in Typography… a clear and defined structure, reflecting the principles of the subject matter perfectly. Jost Hochuli also stresses that Detail in Typography… should not be regarded as infallible. Hochuli counts on “intelligent designers finding appropriate solutions”.

In the words of the author in his introduction:

“While macrotypography -  the typographic layout – is concerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and position of the columns of type and illustrations, with the organization of the hierarchy of headings, subheadings and captions, detail typography is concerned with the individual components – letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the components that graphic or typographic designers like to neglect, as they fall outside the area that is normally regarded as ‘creative’…

…There are many matters of detail typography which one can, in good conscience, resolve differently. The author would certainly not want this book to be regarded as an infallible catechism: rather, he counts on intelligent designers, who, in the spirit of this book, finds appropriate solutions to the problems that arise in a given context, even though not all potential problems are dealt with in this text”

Typography is happily no longer an esoteric art to the average designer and over the last few years there have been a plethora of typography books arriving on the market as the art of typography becomes increasingly accessible: we all now have the possibility of access to thousands of fonts, the expensive cumbersome metal type having made its way onto the desktop computer. With typography being such a huge subject Hochuli’s classification and definition of ‘micro typography’ (a term Hochuli first coined in 1987) makes Detail in Typography… another welcome addition to the range of useful and informative books on the subject of type.

For the established designer Detail in Typography… is a great refresher, a reminder of how concise composition can reside in the detail. For the student or the designer just starting out and wanting reference for typography I would say Detail in Typography… is essential – understand and appreciate ‘micro typography’ and students of design will have a solid foundation for dealing with all things type and type related.

As with all Hyphen books Detail in Typography… is beautifully designed. The red and black colour scheme is striking and effective, the inside covers of solid red a nice touch. Hochuli always backs up his observations and comments with detailed illustrations and examples. Not only a useful text on type, a beautiful book too.

For anyone interested in further reading on typography I would recommend the following two books:

For a contextual look at the history of type I would recommend Modern Typography: an essay in critical history by Robin Kinross. Although currently out of print a re-print is expected soon. From the books back cover, a quote from Matthew Carter, Eye magazine;

“As a brief history of typography it is difficult to think how it could be better.”

I could not put it any better myself. The cover has also got an uncoated finish in bright yellow, although impractical and soon covered by my newsprint fingerprints, looks amazing.

Before this post becomes a Hyphen press love-in I would also recommend The Elements of Typographic Style by Richard Bringhurst for a wider look on the practical application of type. Often quoted as the ‘bible of typography’. But not by me.

About the Reviewer

Owen Priestley is a contributor to the arts, culture and politics blog www.20three.com.
Owen is the Senior Art Director at Brighton digital agency Kerb.

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“Long term success requires both creative ability and business acumen.” In one succinct sentence, Shel Perkins gets to the point. Author of Talent is Not Enough: Business Secrets for Designers, Perkins is a design educator, chairman of the AIGA Center for Practice Management, and has more than twenty years of experience managing the operations of creative firms in the U.S. and U.K. Perkins understands this business.

Practical and approachable, there is a reason the book is currently in its second edition. Perkins has outlined the details of operating a design business, making it an easy-to-understand, transparent process.

Most designers are armed with an arsenal of design skills upon graduation, but the business knowledge is nowhere to be found. It is often learned on the job: you make a mistake, lose time and money, and then learn from the mistake. Perkins’s book helps designers preempt this costly cycle.

The flow of the book is set up to mirror the path of a designer’s career. You begin at graduation and the job hunt, move on to calculating freelance rates and learn how to start a small business: choosing a name, a place to work, building up your team and lastly, becoming an employer. Perkins takes the idea of creating and owning a business from a nebulous unknown mess into a list of organized to-dos.

The book’s interior is printed in all black and white, peppered with explanatory charts and graphs. The chapter divider is the only overtly designed part of the book featuring large, sans serif type on a grayscale field. The divider page is a distilled experience of the book—easy to read, simple design and no extra fluff. All dividers sit on the left side, allowing you to flip through the book from front to back and stop to read what each chapter is about.

With the exception of type that is too small for long bouts of reading, the layout of the book is easy to peruse. The text is broken up into small paragraphs expertly titled and bolded for simple scanning. In the chapter on ‘Successful Design Teams’ a swift scan reveals phrases like, “Careful Recruitment”, “Mutual Respect”, and “Open Communication” presenting a condensed summary of the chapter.

This practical design format parallels the practical writing style of Perkins. In the chapter on ‘Pricing Models’ Perkins shares a simple formula to make negotiating compensation easier for any designer.“’Fast, cheap, good—pick two.’ You won’t want to describe the situation to your client in such a blunt way, but these are in fact the essential trade-offs on creative projects.” Perkins could have easily written about various pricing model terms like ‘Time and Materials’ and ‘Fixed Fee’ in the verbal jargon of the business world; instead, he takes the time to explain each word without making it rudimentary.

Perkins also presents advice on dry topics like insurance. The individual policies freelancers buy are more expensive than group policies made available to businesses. Perkins also gives some valuable for a full-time freelancer, for example:

“Many university alumni associations as well as professional membership organizations like the Graphic Artists Guild, offer their members access to group health plans on a state-by-state basis.”

For a designer fresh out of school, Talent is Not Enough will dispense solid and practical advice. However, this book will be most interesting and useful for those who have been in the field and need a reference guide as they work and progress in their careers. It is not a picture book full of visual inspiration, but a real world checklist on the business of design.

About the Reviewer

Ann Liu is a devout coffee drinker, graphic designer and a MFA Candidate in Graphic Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. You can follow her on twitter @annmaryliu, and see her design work online an annmaryliu.com.

Talent is Not Enough: Business Secrets for Designers is published by New Riders Press. You can also buy it from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or support the Designer’s Review of Books by buying it direct from our Amazon store.

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Review by Allen Tan

Graphic Design: A User’s Manual is a book I wish I had when I started out as a designer.

In the follow-up to his previous work, How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Adrian Shaughnessy focuses less on the nuts and bolts of the studio and is more contemplative, drawing upon his significant experience as a working designer to offer equal parts direction and discussion.

The book is visually striking, set in a monospaced typeface and very deliberately accented with one shade of red. The entries inside are organized alphabetically and cover a broad range of topics from the philosophical and historical to the professional and practical. The pages are sturdy and thick, designed to be thumbed through heavily as a constant reference.

Michael Beirut writes in the foreword:

“one of the most magical things about graphic design…[is] the idea that the empty space in a layout isn’t really empty at all but filled with tension, potential and excitement…In many ways, the lesson of this book is the same…Designing is the most important thing, but it’s not the only thing. All of the other things a designer does are important too, and you have to do them with intelligence, enthusiasm, dedication and love.”

The book is not a how-to guide. It does not teach you the parts of a typeface or explain the process of choosing paper stock. It is not about the craft of design, as important as that is.

This frees Shaughnessy to tackle issues with a different approach. In the section for rejection, he talks about presenting work clearly, defending your decisions, but also owning up to mistakes. He also cautions against projects with complete creative freedom, saying “‘Do what you want’ only rarely means do what you want.” In the entry for envy, Shaughnessy shares, “Envy is a healthy, even necessary, emotion for the designer. If by envying [others' work] we improve our own, envy serves a useful purpose.” And when writing about posters, he brings a historical perspective and discusses its current decline and the consequences for designers.

In other areas, he gives firm direction to the reader. On banks:

“Treat banks like any other supplier: be tough and fair with them. If they make mistakes, remonstrate and ask for compensation.”

I don’t know how many designers need to hear that, but it can’t be just me. He also demystifies the process of finding a first job, the search for inspiration, and the process of presenting to a client.

The book works because it’s so readable. It is designed with care, the text is set well, and entries are given generous margins for notes. The image thumbnails are monochrome and meant to inform and illustrate, not to serve as coffee table eye candy. But more importantly, the writing carries much of Adrian’s personality and wit. We can laugh along with his humorous rant about incorrect ellipsis use, and nod sagely when he points out that “to designers [kerning and tracking] are as important as having wings is to an aeroplane.”

There are a few sections where Adrian looks at design from different countries, including the Dutch and the Japanese. He does his best to describe the unique flavor that distinguishes each place, but the two or three thumbnails only whet the appetite. They can only speak to a few particular artists and fail to convey the whole. I wish there had been a companion gallery made available online that collected the works he writes so admiringly about.

This book will serve as an essential reference for rookies and grizzled designers alike. Peppered with engaging anecdotes and tempered with the time Shaughnessy has been a practitioner of the craft, it is comprehensive in breadth, at times inspiring, reflective, and appraochable. It is knowledge that will inform and enrich your work.

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.

Graphic Design: A User’s Manual is published by Laurence King Publishing. 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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Transforming (Tranformator) – “The process of analysing, selecting, ordering, and then making visual some information, data, ideas, implications…”

I have been waiting for the publication of The transformer: principles of making Isotype charts (Amazon) for a while now. I first became aware of the Isotype (System Of TYpographic Picture Education) work of Otto Neurath while working on data visualisation as the Head of Design at Lateral. At first I was excited about the visual style – I seemed to have come across the root style of information graphics. I soon realised that Isotype was far more than ’style’ – it was and is a fundamental tool in presenting data with maximum efficiency – a method of visualisation that communicates multiple relationships and connections.

Isotype attempts to present as much information as possible in the most effective and simple way possible. The viewer should be able to ‘read’ Isotype charts in several ways and this is what makes Isotype so successful. Otto Neurath’s way of using repeated symbols donating a unit, rather than scaling symbols to donate magnitude is what sets his work apart, and what made his work the beginnings of graphic communication and data visualization based on a solid, well thought out and logical system.

The transformer’s first half, and the main core of the book, is an essay written by Marie Neurath in the last year before her death in 1986. Marie Neurath was the ‘Principle Isotype Transformer’ of the Isotype institution and her essay gives an insightful first hand account of the development of Isotype and the working methods used by the Isotype institution, and how she carried on the work of Isotype after the death of Otto in 1945. The essay was intended as the start of a ‘Primer’ on Isotype that was never published, but it is a credit to Robin Kinross that this essay and this book now exists.

The other sections of the book include an attempt to place Isotype within a greater context of graphic communication, and draws parallels with other practitioners of data visualisation – Harry Beck’s influential London Underground diagram gets a worthy mention, as does that champion of standardisation and modernist typographer, Jan Tschichold.

Like the other Hyphen books in the series The transformer… is a beautifully designed and put together book, with many colour illustrations, many of which I would have liked to have seen reproduced at a much larger scale. While reading Marie Neurath’s essay I had wished I had more information into her non professional life – Otto and Marie obviously had obstacles to manoeuvre, the war enforcing at least one move upon them as they fled the Nazis. The obituary reproduced at the end of the book helps make up for any lack of  insight into the personality of Marie Neurath.

I would have also liked to have had a little more information about Gerd Arntz, a collaborator of the Isotype institution, member of the progressive artists group’ (Gruppe progressiver Künstler Köln), socially inspired and politically committed artist and activist. In The transformer... he gets a credit for introducing die cut to the working process of the Isotype institution, and is mentioned as a key collaborator. You can read more about Gerd Arntz and view the extensive gallery of his Isotype symbols here – http://www.gerdarntz.org/home.

Please also note the very considered use of the typeface Futura on the illustrations above.

About the Reviewer

Owen Priestley is a contributor to the arts culture and politics blog www.20three.com.
Owen currently holds the position of Senior Art Director at Brighton agency Kerb.

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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.

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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 wanted to read Austin Howe’s Designers Don’t Read just to be contrary. I read a great deal, as you might imagine writing these reviews. Indeed, one of the main reasons for starting The Designer’s Review of Books was a complaint about the paucity of writing in many design books. Howe is a Creative Director and “design advocate”, but most importantly he is a writer. So, I had high hopes for the book, not all of which were dashed, but a few worries about the title were confirmed.

The material in Designers Don’t Read started life as a series of essays sent out as weekly e-mails to some of Howe’s favourite designers scattered across the USA. These mails were forwarded onto other designers and forwarded on again. As such, the book is divided into a number of very short chapters ranging from a single page to three or four and has the style of a well-written blog (in fact, I wondered why this wasn’t a blog instead of a collection of e-mailed essays).

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Somewhat wittily, Howe has given each chapter a reading time allocation – Every Design Firm Sounds Exactly the Same is a three minute read, for example. The longest chapter weighs in at nine and a half minutes (Concept Development: Some Different Approaches that Work). The shortest, such as Sometimes the Most Inspiring Thing You Can Say Is Nothing and The End, require just thirty seconds. You can read any chapter quicker than you can drink a coffee. So, no excuses.

The premise behind this approach, according to Howe, is that most good designers are busy “and, with a few notable exceptions, they tend to be more visually oriented and more inspired by imagery than they are by words.” This is where the book needs to be placed in context. When Howe speaks of designers, it seems to be a view of the profession narrowly defined to graphic designers within an agency context. Howe moved across from advertising to design and he cares, deeply, about the divisions between those worlds and trying to “bring together the collective strengths of the different creative disciplines”. Fine fightin’ words, but one wonders how far that bringing together can go with such a narrow focus.

Maybe it is my own background in less traditional design areas such as interaction and service design – areas that tend towards cross-disciplinary approaches. Or maybe I just don’t care enough about ad agency life and selling people stuff they don’t need, but I found it hard to gain much in the way of insights. There is nothing bad or wrong about what he writes, it’s just not as insightful as I had hoped. Howe foreshadows the reason when describing the enthusiastic response to his e-mails in the opening chapter:

“It wasn’t that I was sharing a lot of new concepts, either. Many of my readers had already studied or experienced many of the topics I was writing about – some in much greater depth than I had. But now, a few years into their careers, I think what they appreciated was a fresh, relevant context for those things, from someone who was not speaking as a a design critic or (importantly) as a designer, but as a writer and creative director with an appreciation for–and a point of view about–design.”

And therein lies a paradox. For a designer who does read, the book is an entertaining read, but is not going to add a lot to your store of knowledge. For designers who don’t read, there’s plenty of pithy anecdotes to inspire, but then they are not going to be reading it anyway. (If you’re one of those, what are you doing reading this?). If, by some chance, you fall in the middle and have not taken time to reflect on your discipline for a while, then read this book.

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There is a much more important lesson to take home from Howe’s book. It is not that designers don’t read enough (although that is probably true), but that designers should write more. My guess is that Howe gained a great deal more from the process of writing his e-mail essays than those reading them – and I don’t mean that as a criticism. His love for writing, for thinking creatively with words, words often coupled with visuals, is clear and present. The Writing As Art chapter, which also lists some of Howe’s favourite writers, and the self-reflective moments are the most engaging as are the (ironically) visual jokes in the appendices.

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. Writing is a stripped down process and it is hard to cheat. There are no cool filters, no 3D tricks or flashy new technologies to cover up the words. Words are words whether they are scratched in the dirt or written on a computer. It is like designing with a limited palette that has millions of possible combinations. As treatise for designers on how to write, Designers Don’t Read is a good place to start.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Designers Don’t Read by Austin Howe (@TheAustinHowe) is published by Allworth Press.

You can buy it from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or support the Designer’s Review of Books buy buying from the Designer’s Review of Books store.

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Review by Virginia Sasser

We know that sustainability is an urgent design issue, despite the fact that some of us are tired of mainstream “greenness” blanketing our consumer landscape with tree frogs and leaf icons. But are we as designers aware of all the realistic ecological options that exist in our field? Doing the right thing is tough, especially when clients and budgets are involved. Brian Dougherty’s book Green Graphic Design is a useful read for any designer who wants to learn pragmatic, clear-cut approaches to making environmentally sensible work.

Dougherty, a founding partner of Celery Design Collaborative, is a legitimate voice at the forefront of ecological communication and sustainable corporate design. Celery’s eco-friendly practices have been recognized by ID Magazine’s ID 40 list of influential design firms and by the AIGA Environmental Leadership Award. Their “designing backwards” and green branding philosophies pertain to all visual communicators who want to maintain a bearing on the industry’s momentum.

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Dougherty gives a design-centered overview of well-traversed sustainable principles such as waste, value, and the market inevitability of green commodities. “The influence of design is increasing,” he says, asserting that graphic designers have an added responsibility to produce more sustainable work. Dougherty describes his concept of “green design as an avocado,” with “change” representing the vital core that sets it apart from the rest of the field.

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But most of us know why green design is important. The resonant content is when Dougherty gets past the theoretical analogies and answers the lingering question of how. The heart of his book details a straightforward, systematic approach to alterations designers should make to their process, and they go well beyond the standard rhetoric about printing on recycled paper (though it has a great “Ecological Guide to Paper” in the back).

Dougherty’s argument revolves around fundamentally changing the way we think about design. He encourages better decision-making long before materials come into play. He calls it “designing backwards,” which considers the “destiny” of a design first. You start, he says, by figuring out a design’s terminating fate, such as litter, landfill, recycling plant, or compost heap, and then move backwards in the process. Considering the journey of a design step-by-step in reverse enables designers to plan for the “greenest case scenario,” and as Dougherty explains, “creatively avoid most of the roadblocks that might prevent green solutions from continuing downstream.”

The pragmatic guidelines encourage designers to critically assess and redefine their approach to projects through detailed scenario planning and forethought. Understanding the audience and outcome, using the right production and shipping methods for the job, talking to clients, responsible strategizing, and choosing the right ink and bindings are among the many factors the book considers. Case studies from Celery’s long history and other external projects illustrate Dougherty’s ideas. They range from Canada’s successful beer bottle take-back system to IDEO’s plantable seed-filled packaging for Pangea Organics. The addition of a glossary, resource list, and sustainability scorecard in the back make Green Graphic Design a convenient guide without the dryness of a typical reference book.

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Dougherty’s insights also examine the corporate responsibilities and green branding that are revolutionizing our businesses. “It is important to remember that sustainability is not some vague, malleable notion. It is specific and measurable. It is also incredibly rare.”

The book warns of the dangers of greenwashing, such as exaggerated declarations from self-proclaimed eco-friendly brands. Dougherty encourages honest communication about a company’s environmental successes and challenges to facilitate the designer’s ability to create real solutions. “Transparency helps graphic designers craft communications with real substance. It takes design out of the role of cheerleading and places it into a role of change agent.”

Dougherty acknowledges that green design is a challenging but real option. “Ultimately, ‘sustainability’ is just a beginning,” he writes.

“We don’t want to sustain. We want to thrive. It is extremely important that we transform our communications systems to cause far less environmental damage. But being ‘less bad’ is not what motivates us. We are motivated by the exciting, creative opportunities that await us. We strive for the positive potential that designers can unleash – in our own practice, in the operations of our clients, and in the actions of the people who receive our messages.”

And they practice what they preach. The book itself was printed with low-VOC vegetable-based inks on 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. The green design decision to make the majority of the book in one color does not sacrifice its visual appeal.

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While full of clear and engaging detail, at times the book lacks straightforward organization. The chapter and sectional hierarchy is somewhat puzzling and makes navigating the content tricky. That aside, it maintains a pleasing design that supports the content. Dougherty’s writing is personable and encouraging. The information flow is relieved by large callouts, and the black and white visuals are attractive and unpretentious.

With Green Graphic Design designers will not only be well equipped to make more sustainable decisions on their future projects, but they will also know how to convey that conscientiousness to their clients and audiences. Dougherty successfully disentangles much of the abstract eco-information floating around today and reinvigorates a weary discussion with excellent, concrete examples.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Green Graphic Design By Brian Dougherty with Celery Design Collaborative is published by Allworth Press. You can buy it from Amazon (US|CA|UK|DE) or The Designer’s Review of Books store.

About the Reviewer

Virginia Sasser is a 2nd year student on the Graphic Design MFA program at MICA.

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