The Swissness of things

The first book looked at graphic design.  ISBN 978 3037783993

This the second book of Swiss design sponsored by the Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich. The first title covered graphic design, this book has a much broader scope looking at product design though it does concentrate more on consumer rather commercial products. The book is divided into decades and because some design trends and style don't stop and start so neatly some of the essays look at their subject in a broader way, for example in the chapter devoted to the 1930s Arthur Ruegg writes about 'The 'New' light: 100 years of Swiss lighting design'. The ground breaking product exhibition 'Die gute form' created by Max Bill in 1949 is another example of design that influenced designers (and the public) in the following decades.

Each decade starts with a mini photo portfolio followed by products that get a page each with relevant text and captions. The illustrated essays are mixed in with these product pages. I thought the choice of illustrations (about seven hundred) throughout the book was excellent, products are shown in use plus studio shots, designer concept drawings and graphics connected to the product.

Like the other book on graphic design this one is beautifully designed and printed, the upright shape of both books give them an air of credibility. The back pages have a very comprehensive bibliography followed by an Index and biographies of the sixteen contributors. I think it's worth mentioning the translation by Jennifer Taylor, she has done a first-class job turning the original text into everyday English.

The perfect overview of Swiss design culture over the decades.

Branded

The latest logo (bottom right) looks very flat compared to the 2010 version (bottom middle).

According to the book he is Major Quality and his sweetheart Miss Sweetly.

This is really Logo Life lite (ISBN 978 9063692605).  That book with a hundred  company logos shown historically (some are in this book, too) was much more interesting than this one, least for designers.  Tasty stories is more of a casual presentation of twenty-three company logos and PR histories of the companies.   The brands are all big name food companies from Europe with eight American ones. 

What I found intriguing looking at the various logo changes over the years is that some of the newer designs don't necessarily look better than a logo from the recent past.  The current Douwe Egberts seems to lack any sparkle when compared to the 2010 design, Quality Street chocolates (now owned by Nestle) have a dull looking mark compared to the one used during the nineties.  On the other hand the latest Duvel beer logo, still using the traditional black letter type, looks brilliant.  A feature throughout the pages is seeing logos large.  Page eighty-one has two from Kellogg's, one from 1970 and the other 2012, only a typographer would be able to point out the very slight differences.

Worth buying if you can find it cheap enough but Logo Life is much, much better.

A Neue Grafik version

The forty-eight page magazine format publication that comes with the set.

At last, a welcome reprint of this famous but short-lived Swiss magazine. Anyone who knows their design/typographic history will have read about the publication and maybe even seen a copy. It's reputation has grown over the decades despite a small circulation and it wasn't really professionally edited or promoted though the four editors, all designers, bought an enthusiasm and love of graphic creativity to each issue.

The reprint is certainly a handsome job. A study box holds the seventeen copies (issues seventeen and eighteen were published as one in February 1965). The original magazine used a 150 screen, this reprint uses a 200 screen and copies each page properly using line and tone rather than screening the whole page. An additional forty-eight page book has background essays about New Graphic Design and its influence around the world, biographies of the four editors and an Index to the issues.

I think Lars Muller are to be congratulated for reprinting this famous (least among designers) publication and making its contents available to a new audience.

The fluid lines of modernity

Some other books that cover the same subject.

The essence of this book are ninety-five heavily illustrated biographies of the designers and artists from around the world who produced the feel and look of mid-century creativity. The seven chapters cover: Furniture (109 pages) Lighting (42) Glass and ceramics (58) Textiles (46) Industrial and product design (48) Graphics (55) Houses and interiors (123). This is a very comprehensive coverage of modernity though, in my view, with some slight idiosyncrasies: why does the rather narrowly defined Lighting get so many pages and the broad scope of Industrial design only forty-eight and not one Case Study House is featured in the Houses chapter.

Each of the chapters has one or two essays with an overview of the subject with Furniture and Houses also looking at the collecting aspect. I thought these illustrated essays well worth reading especially Steven Heller's on 'Type, design and technology' and the author neatly sums up modernity with his six page intro. There is also a useful thirty-three page illustrated A-Z at the back of the book with about three hundred entries of individuals and companies, looking through these I found it hard to think of someone who had been left out.

Because the biographies are more or less standard detail, the sort of thing you can read in books by design historians Charlotte and Peter Fiell, it's the photos that made the pages come alive for me, there are over a thousand of them, all in colour and mostly big on the page. Slightly annoying that several hundred are cutouts floating on the page without a slight drop shadow, some do have this shadow effect and it makes them look much more interesting. The Houses chapter, the longest in the book, is particularly fine with plenty of wonderful interiors, rather the opposite of many architectural books that tend to favour just an exterior shot of a house.

Complete in the book's title is very true.

Spreading information

First off I thought the title was slightly misleading. 'Designing information' might make you think the book was concerned essentially with the presentation of infographics or data visualisation but it presents a much broader look at design though many of the 230 illustrations could be classed as infographics. The text is based around the thoughts of sixteen designers and their approach to design (or in others words: information) and a Q and A interview format is used. This style is useful for the reader because I found much of what they said revealed a very personal approach to their design solutions and without specific questions much of the text would be rather rambling.

The thoughts of the sixteen designers are really quite varied. So much of their work shown in the pages is basically directed at small design aware audiences where a non-traditional approach to images and typography is readily accepted. Two designers views really stood out for me though, Tim Fendley works on city wayfinding and Mark Porter works with visual editorial (he created the look of The Guardian) because their work involved presenting design to a mass market.

The pages are well presented and all the illustrations have excellent captions. The Index is rather unorthodox listing: academic; access; aesthetics; amateurism; architectural legibility; architecture; art museums et cetera and below each the word the name of the designer (and page number) who mentioned that particular word. A rather silly and confusing way of communicating in my view.

Thoughts on Designing Information will interest design studios and those institutions connected with design education