Speed it up 4/5

This book is a reasonable visual survey of streamlined transport from a European perspective. America can claim to be the place where streamline really took off, though essentially seen as a commercial concept to sell more products. Add three speed lines or a horizontal teardrop shape to any household product to guarantee sales during the thirties and forties.

European designers didn't see streamline as a sales tool but more as an idea to increase speed in any form of transport, though I think the two authors have stretched the title by including, surprisingly, airships; there are several photos of the LZ Graf Zepperlin. The European-designed trains lacked the slickness of the American versions but it's worth remembering, in the case of steam trains, that the engines looked streamlined because they were completely covered in a metal shroud. The Henry Dreyfuss-designed New York Central 'Twentieth Century Limited' must have looked really impressive thundering through a rural station. European cars fared better in their design. Fiat and Peugeot looked as good as the very popular Chrysler 'Airflow' designed by Norman Bel Geddes.

The pages include most forms of transport, particularly trains and cars, with a look-in at motorcycles, ships and aircraft. I thought it unfortunate that all this interesting material wasn't presented to the reader with more care. The text and captions use quite small type and so many of the photos are excessively small despite plenty of page space to display them.

Brand new

The latest huge, chunky graphic design title from Taschen looks at company branding around the world. There are a couple of things I really liked about the book. 

First, the authors have avoided something that would have appeared in similar titles: an historical look back at excellent corporate design, for example, Saul Bass's work for Bell Telephone in the sixties or Karl Gerstner's corporate work for Swissair in the seventies. The introduction does have some historical visual examples but as it says, the development of software and computers from the mid-eighties onward allowed designers to approach branding in a different way.

 

 Second, the editorial format breaks the content into seventeen sections, starting with Logo, Logo systems, Typography, Colour, Objects, Pattern, etc. This is a clever solution and allows the reader to consider various individual elements of a brand.

The branding is from 110 companies, big and small, for example, Deutsche Bank (2024 design) to the Toulouse-based Theatre Sorano (2025) with their exuberant posters and programs. The book is probably eighty per cent illustrations. Each brand starts on a spread and usually runs over to the next spread. As expected, there are plenty of corporate alphabets and graphics to reveal how a logo works.

Overall, a super book for any design studio to have on their shelves.

 

Well-written and red

The weekly Economist magazine (the staff likes to consider it a newspaper) in 1984 asked ad man David Abbott to create some posters to increase the circulation. This handsome-looking book, with 256 pages, features two hundred red-and-white text posters created by ad agencies. The most well-known one is: "I never read the Economist." Management trainee. Ages 42.

The landscape pages display the posters with Alfredo Marcantonio's copy running beside them to reveal the thinking behind some remarkably creative headlines over the years. Copies of the book seem rather rare and expensive, so it's worth searching the net for a copy.