Fowl facts

What a delightful book about chickens for young readers. The text is packed with facts and nicely it's written in a light-hearted style that's easy to understand but what I really liked about the book are the easy on the eye graphic illustrations by Camilo Pintonato (and she designed the pages, as well). Though the illustrations might look rather casual they are correct when detail requires it, pages five and six showing various chicken breeds or the meaning of feather colors on pages sixteen and seventeen. Other illustrations, for example, a henhouse, the natural world, people or food all have a light touch and color that children should enjoy.

The book's subtitle: 'The ultimate encyclopaedia' is true. A huge amount of information is packed into the seventy-four pages. Who knew that a Jersey Giant can be almost three feet tall, chickens often stand on one leg to relax, they can count up to four, the Vietnamese drink egg coffee or that hen therapy works for children and the elderly.  The last eight pages have a series of lovely large one to a page pictures of breeds shown in a very graphic style and details of eight breeds.

The publishers have a similar book called Pigology coming out in the autumn, illustrated by Camilla Pintonato, I would add to that an 'ology' on sheep, cows and horses. 

Techno color

Leif Podhajsky's record covers in this book go far beyond the usual studio headshot of the artist or group, though there is one example of that with London Grammar's 2017 'Truth is a beautiful thing' with a prominent shot of singer Hannah Reid but the CD digipak cover folds out to an abstract of a desert landscape, so it's not really the usual cover after all. 

The book is divided into four main sections: Synesthesia; Nature; Digital ritual; Anthropocene. Each has an essay and large illustrations, some a spread wide so they look quite stunning. Podhajsky's record packaging for fourteen rock and indie groups is split over the four main sections. Quite varied abstract designs are meant to reflect the feel of the music though looking at some of the complex swirling shapes and beautiful colors I can't help feeling that much of Podhajsky's work will outlast some of the music from these groups.

There is hardly any mention of how Podhajsky creates these dramatic images, Photoshop has a brief mention on page 173 but a lot of the work seems very similar to the use of Mandelbrot sets to create fractals. The back pages have a chronology of covers from 2010 to 2020 and most of them feature abstractions. 

There are 250illustrations in the book, well printed on a lovely matt art paper. Certainly, a worthwhile book if you want to what contemporary commercial art is up to. 

The home of color

 

David Harrison has chosen 250 examples of homewares to illustrate his book. In the intro, he writes that colour wasn't really considered in the design of products prior to World War 1, though an obvious exception would be the colourful wallpaper designs by Augustus Pugin and William Morris.  By the fifties of the last century, designers had a range of materials, especially plastics and manufacturing techniques that allowed their creativity to blossom. There are thirty-two products shown from 1920 to 1950, the remaining 218 run from the fifties to 2020.

I think it's worth saying that more than half of the featured products are seating, basically chairs and sofas. The rest are a selection of ceramics, lighting, storage furniture, tables, carpets, fabrics and a small selection of electric items. Technology doesn't really extend to colour in a domestic environment, featured is a 1962 Brionvega orange cube radio, Jacob Jensen 1970 B&O Beolit radio and a 1998 green and white iMac. 

As seating is so prominent throughout the book some of the examples seem almost anti-design (in the sense that design should be practical and suited to its use). Tom Dixon's Pylon chair made of wire but lacks upholstery to sit on though it does look very much like a pylon, Terje Ekstrom's Lounge chair constructed of bent tubular steel and covered in thick foam has no actual seat or even Gerrit Rieveld's stunning Red and blue chair from 1917 only has a blue lacquered piece of thin wood as the seat and probably feels uncomfortable after a while.

The book is nicely produced with a photo and deep caption on each page, this gives some background detail about the designer and the product. There are six portfolios of designers (Albers, Girard, Panton, Mendini, Jongerius, Levien, Scholten and Wood) with an essay and examples of their work. The book will interest interior design students and anyone who wants to see and read about products designed for the home in the last few decades, especially seating. 

Noticeboard creativity

IBM built up a reputation for design excellence, whether it was a computer or, as this book shows, employee communication. There are just over a hundred interesting posters in this book, a good selection of the more than five hundred produced in the fifteen-year life of the design studio at the IBM Boulder, Colorado building. 

Three internal staff designers, John Anderson, Tom Bluhm,  Ken White and photographer Rodger Ewy created these posters for staff noticeboards. These weren't ad posters with big budgets for design, photography, or illustrations, instead, the designers had to come up with visual ideas that worked for a range of themes like health and safety; security; product announcements; events; quality and excellence; management development; savings bonds. Obviously, some themes are difficult to illustrate so several posters are just typographic. For example, a security poster just said 'Badger the Badgerless' or for equal opportunity 'pEOple. Within all of us. Equal Opportunity

The posters were all the same size, fifteen by twenty-one inches and printed silkscreen or litho in Denver with runs of up to two thousand and distributed to various company buildings around the US. The book has most of the posters one to a page with some background material about the program and the three designers fill the first few pages. Roger Ewy sums up the success of these posters because so many of them were removed by the staff to take home.