Weekly Wrap-Up & Preview: March 28
March 28, 2014
Our Wrap-Up & Preview is back, now appearing at the end of each month with highlights from the previous weeks and a foretaste of what’s to come. Over the past several weeks we featured a book list from Anthony Dunne of Dunne & Raby and an essay on “digital flattening” by logo designer Mark Fox, who also sent some new additions to his book list. We celebrated our three-year anniversary with a look back at some book lists from our archive and and we also posted themed book lists honoring the birthdays of architects Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe and in collaboration with CreativeMornings and its March theme of “Hidden.” We continue to highlight new books in our homepage announcements weekly. April will bring book lists from Fiona Raby and Dan Formosa, an interview with Dan Saffer—a Creative Director at Smart Design—and more.
Weekly Wrap-Up
Anthony Dunne, Head of Design Interactions at London’s Royal College of Art and partner, with Fiona Raby in the design studio Dunne & Raby, offers a list of books that “celebrate parallel worlds, the imagination, and unreality in some way.” Dunne is a co-author of the recently published Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming.
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Logo designer Mark Fox reflects on digital and analog culture through the lens of two selections from his book list.
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Our fifth book list developed in collaboration with CreativeMornings, a breakfast lecture series for the creative community, each with a monthly theme, is based on March’s theme: “Hidden.”
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Fifteen books from our contributors on American architect Louis I. Kahn (February 20, 1901– March 17, 1974). Updated May 1, 2022.
Additional books can be found on The Louis I. Kahn Facsimile Project.
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To celebrate the three-year anniversary of Designers & Books, launched in February 2011, we’ve brought together five book lists from our archive of more than 300 lists of books that have inspired designers and design commentators.
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Linda Fallon, Head Buyer at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, sent a along a few design titles being published in Spring 2014 is especially looking forward to seeing on the store’s shelves.
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A follow-up to “50 Books on Type on Typography,” here are a dozen additional books from our contributors that explore lettering.
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Happy Birthday, Mies van der Rohe! These 12 books on architect Mies van der Rohe (b. March 27, 1886, d. August 19, 1969) were chosen or written by our contributors, including Massimo Vignelli, Stanley Tigerman, and Phyllis Lambert, or come from our featured publishers. Building Seagram was the winner of the 2013 Designers & Books Design Book of the Year Award, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies was a Designers & Books Notable Book of 2012, and Detlef Mertins’s Mies was just published this month.
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“My book list is like album tracks that take me back to a moment in time,” says Fiona Raby, a partner (with Anthony Dunne) in the industrial design research studio Dunne & Raby. The partners’ work encompasses “speculative everything,” to use the title of Dunne and Raby’s latest book, which sees design as a tool for speculating on how things might be and to imagine possible futures.
Designers & Books talks with Dan Saffer, a Creative Director at Smart Design and author of four books on design, including, most recently, Microinteractions: Designing with Details, on importance of designing the “small stuff” from phone settings to smoke detector alarms.
Announcements
Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister
Now is Better
By Stefan Sagmeister
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: October 2023
Combining art, design, history, and quantitative analysis, transforms data sets into stunning artworks that underscore his positive view of human progress, inspiring us to think about the future with much-needed hope.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Published: May 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
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Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Milton Glaser: POP by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Milton Glaser: POP
By Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: March 2023
This collection of work from graphci design legend Milton Glaser’s Pop period features hundreds of examples of the designer’s work that have not been seen since their original publication, demonstrating the graphic revolution that transformed design and popular culture.
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
By Alexandra Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: June 2022
Chronicles postwar architects’ and merchants’ invention of the shopping mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Publishers Weekly writes, “Contending that malls answer ‘the basic human need’ of bringing people together, influential design critic Lange advocates for retrofitting abandoned shopping centers into college campuses, senior housing, and ‘ethnocentric marketplaces’ catering to immigrant communities. Lucid and well researched, this is an insightful study of an overlooked and undervalued architectural form.”
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition) by Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902–1911 (Facsimile Edition)
By Diane V. Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller
Publisher: Letterform Archives Books
Published: October 2023
This facsimile edition of Die Fläche, recreates every page of the formative design periodical in full color and at original size, accompanied by essays that contextualize the work, highlighting contributions by pathbreaking women, innovative lettering artists, and key practitioners of the new “surface art,” including Rudolf von Larisch, Alfred Roller, and Wiener Werkstätte founders Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann.
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