Looney Tunes Treasury

If you liked the look of the LT Treasury, check out The Hanna-Barbera Treasury, much more ambitious and full of extras. See some of them here:

Westread Book Reviews: 'toon nostalgia (5/5) (westreadreviews.blogspot.com) 

A worthwhile overview of Looney Tunes animation. I think the book is really aimed at a young market because of the rather flamboyant page design and youngsters will enjoy the various stuck-in additions throughout the title (it's worth saying that if you are buying a pre-used copy you'll need to check with the seller that all the loose items are in their envelopes).

Writer Andy Farago had the clever idea of having the cartoon characters write about themselves so they become much more friendly.

Fans of animation will also enjoy a book from the same publisher: The Hanna-Barbera Treasury (ISBN 978-1933784281) a much more ambitious work that, again, is stuffed with amazing extras.

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.