An amazing book trailer for an amazing pop-up book by illustrator Benjamin Lacombe:
(via Daily Design Discoveries)
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Published September 17, 2010
The Casual Optimist Posts
Published September 17, 2010
Something for the Weekend
Thanks for the CBC Books blog for including The Casual Optimist in their list of 10 ‘Book Blogs We Appreciate’ earlier this week. It is always nice to be appreciated — I only hope I can live up to the billing… :-)
The Story of Eames Furniture — Written and designed by Marilyn Neuhart together with her husband John, who both worked with the Eames Office from the 1950’s until 1978, the year Charles Eames’s died. Published later this month by Gestalten, the book comes in two full-colour volumes with a slipcase.
The Future of the Future — William Gibson interviewed in The Atlantic:
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F—it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well… I’m not going all Sex Pistols, shouting No Future!—I’m suggesting that we’re becoming more like Europeans, who have always retrofitted their ruins, who’ve always known that everyone lives in someone else’s future and someone else’s past.
Respect for the Users — Jay Rosen‘s inaugural lecture to incoming students at Sciences Po école du journalisme in Paris earlier this month:
The Web effortlessly records what people do with it. Therefore it is easy to measure user behavior: what people are interested in, what they are searching for, clicking on, turning to… right now. What should a smart journalists do with this “live” information?… [Y]ou should listen to demand, but also give people what they have no way to demand because they don’t know about it yet. In fact, there is a relationship between these things. The better you are at listening to demand, the more likely it is that the users will listen to you when you say to them: you may not think this is important or interesting, but trust me… it matters. Or: “this is good.” Ignoring what the users want is dumb in one way; editing by click rate is dumb in a different way. Respect for the users lies in between these two.
And finally…
Graphic designer James Patrick Gibson talks to Babelgum about his photoblog New Type York , an archive of images of typographic artifacts — signs, directions and building inscriptions — around New York City (via DesignRelated):
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Published September 17, 2010
Homage to the Square
A short documentary about the artist and educator Josef Albers, author of the seminal Interaction of Color and widely regarded as the father of modern colour theory:
The film is the first part of ‘The Full Spectrum’ a three-part series on colour produced earlier this year by Dwell Magazine.
(via Swiss Legacy)
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Published September 16, 2010
Massimo Vignelli — A Short Documentary
It is turning into something of a mini Massimo Vignelli week at The Casual Optimist. Here is John Madere’s short documentary about the designer, mentioned briefly on Wednesday:
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Published September 16, 2010
The Desk
The Desk is a fascinating mini-documentary about our complex relationships with our workspace. It features commentary from experts Alice Twemlow, Eric Abrahamson, Massimo Vignelli, David Miller, Kurt Andersen, Søren Kjær, Alfred Stadler, Jennifer Lai, and Ben Bajorek:
Created by Imaginary Forces for L Studio, The Desk first episode in a series called ‘Lines’ that looks at the design of everyday objects and they affect us. Other episodes include The High Heel, The Lens, The Elevator, and The Parking Structure.
(via Brandon Schaefer)
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Published September 16, 2010
Let’s REDU
Published September 15, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
Another great set of designs for the 2009 D&AD student award brief for typography sponsored by Faber and Faber, this time by Rinse Design (via Cosa Visuales). See also: Ed Cornish’s designs for the brief.
Phaidon have relaunched their website and it is really rather nice (via FormFiftyFive).
The Imaginary Present — Mike Doherty interviews William Gibson about his new novel Zero History for The National Post:
In his earlier books, Gibson says, he aimed to devise “futures that felt as though they were filled with designed artifacts, as indeed they would be. I can’t think of too many science fiction writers who’d bother trying to do that.” In the [new] series, his devotion to design has gone into overdrive, reflecting the idea that “everything is ‘designer,’ ” even though “with most things, you’ll never know the name of a designer.”
PopMatters also spoke to the author about the new book.
Code — Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, reviews Tom McCarthy’s C for The New York Times:
[McCarthy] aligns disparate things into larger patterns full of recurring images: analogies between the human body and earth, and machinery; hums and whirs; film screens; bowels and tunnels; electric circuits; cauls and other silken membranes. These repetitions come to feel like the articulation of a larger code — as if, were readers to plot their exact positions throughout the novel, they would discover a hidden message.
What Ever Happened to Reading Properly? — ReadySteadyBlog’s Mark Thwaite on critics misreading of Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?:
It’s interesting that Josipovici’s book which, in many ways, is both a call to read more carefully and an enquiry into why reading carefully is beyond so many cultural gatekeepers, has been read so sloppily by so many of its critics… Josipovici doesn’t invoke marginal or avant-garde writers, nor praise typographical or narrative playfulness over stale traditionalism, but rather brings us back to canonical writers (a good part of his essay is taken up with Wordsworth) and allows us to see what was at stake for those artists in their work, and what is at stake for us as readers.
And finally… It’s Vignelli week at Design Observer:
Debbie Millman’s 2007 interview with Massimo Vignelli (excerpted from her book How To Think Like a Graphic Designer):
I’m interested in “essence” — my major aim is really to get to the essence of the problem. And just throw away everything that’s not pertinent to it. At the end of a project, my work should be the projection of that experience, the essence of effect. It’s a habit that you get into… The essence is what is left when there’s nothing else that you can throw away.
Michel Bierut profiles Lella Vignelli:
Massimo has often defined their working relationship like this: “I’m the engine, and Lella is the brakes.” The first time I heard this as a young designer, it was clear to me which was more important. If you were a designer, wouldn’t you want to be the engine, powerful, propulsive, driving forward? It was only years later that I remembered something my high school driving instructor once said: “You don’t get killed in a car accident because the car won’t start. You get killed because the breaks fail.”
And, there is an interesting, beautifully shot, video interview with Massimo Vignelli by photographer John Madere here.
There will surely be more good stuff as the week progresses…
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Published September 15, 2010
The Gutenberg Variations
Beautiful paintings of books and bookshelves by artist Stanford Kay:
(via This Isn’t Happiness)
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Published September 11, 2010
Bread and Surfing
I posted this documentary short about baker Chad Robertson, co-founder of Tartine Bakery & Café in San Francisco and author of Tartine Bread, on the Raincoast Books blog yesterday. I wanted to share it here as well because there is definitely something inspiring about Chad’s process, enthusiasm, and dedication to his craft. And he’s a surfer…
(Disclosure: Tartine Bread is published by Chronicle Books, who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)
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Published September 10, 2010
Tom McCarthy Podcast
Tom McCarthy reads from his his new novel C and discusses the book with Sarah Crown, online editor of The Guardian‘s book page:
My interview with book designer Peter Mendelsund and Tom about C is here.
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Published September 10, 2010
Something for the Weekend
A series of book cover design concepts for The Infamous Press by Norwegian graphic designer Morten Iveland (via IS050).
Paid by the Joke — The enduring appeal of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar in The Guardian:
Billy Liar’s longevity is not an example of a tale that is told and told again with a dulling faithfulness; rather, the long life of Billy Liar is a story of reincarnation, of each new generation seizing upon the tale afresh and making the story its own. Its influence may be felt in half a century of creative endeavour, in drama and literature and film, and, perhaps most keenly, in popular music: referenced, for instance, in the video for the Oasis single The Importance of Being Idle, and in a song by the Decemberists, and popping up, too, in many of Morrissey’s lyrics, including the Smiths’ 1984 hit William, It Was Really Nothing.
And if anyone at Penguin is reading, please, please reissue Billy Liar with the Tony Meeuwissen Woodbine cover from the 1970’s (come on, you know you want to):
(image via David The Designer)
If Covers Could Talk — A nice satirical book cover blog, kind of like Unhappy Hipsters for books.
And finally…
W. W. Norton, who have done great job with their Flickr — particularly their book design archive where the above stunner by Gray318 comes from — now have a Tumblr as well. The latest post, at the time of writing, is an animated scene from Stitches, the graphic memoir by David Small. Nice work.
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