Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 9, 2013

Product/industrial designer Jens Martin Skibsted: KiBiSi and Biomega (Copenhagen)
Profile     Book List
Jens Martin Skibsted designs ahead-of-the curve bicycles for Biomega, a company he founded, and electronics, household products, and furnishings for the top Scandinavian industrial design studio KiBiSi, another firm he founded—along with Bjarke Ingels (BIG) and Lars Larsen (Kilo Design). He has been named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader for his design thinking and runs Skibsted Ideation, a design and branding agency. More...

Notable Design Books: Reviews
By Steve Kroeter April 4, 2013

To kick off spring, Designers & Books is posting its first compilation of Notable Design Books of 2013. We invited a group of esteemed design community members—our Book Board—to select titles published in 2013 that they think are particularly worth noting. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter April 2, 2013

Design curator Aric Chen: M+ (Hong Kong)
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Design writer Zara Arshad: Design China (Beijing)
Profile
The recently appointed Curator of Design and Architecture at M+, the new museum for visual culture that will be a centerpiece of Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, Aric Chen looks forward to developing a design and architecture permanent collection, including a library, for the museum. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 25, 2013

Product/industrial designer Carl Magnusson: CGM Design LLC (New York)
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Design, believes Carl Magnusson, “must evoke an experience physically and culturally beyond its core function.” The eminent industrial designer—the winner of Contract magazine’s 2012 Legend Award for lifetime achievement—was talking about the “central message that stuck” from Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture, on his book list for Designers and Books, but he was really talking about all of design. More...

Interviews
By Steve Kroeter March 21, 2013

Harvard University Press is 100 years old this year. The venerable publisher, which has issued renowned scholarly series such as the Loeb Classical Library and the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures as well as numerous Pulitzer Prize-winning titles, is marking the anniversary by introducing a new visual identity—one that represents a significant departure from the traditional graphic imagery associated with the Press’s past. For some insights into how this all came about, Designers & Books talked with the designer of the new logo, Sagi Haviv, partner at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, and Harvard University Press’s Director of Design and Production, Tim Jones. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 19, 2013

Graphic designer Peter Mendelsund: Alfred A. Knopf Books, Pantheon Books, Vertical Press (New York)
Profile     Book List
“How I became a designer is anyone’s guess, but it certainly had nothing to do with reading design books,” says Peter Mendelsund, the book designer who created 11 of the winning book covers for the “50 Books/50 Covers” competition of 2011 and whose covers for Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy have been described by the Wall Street Journal as being “the most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 12, 2013

Product and graphic designer Freeman Lau: Kan & Lau Design Consultants (Hong Kong)
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Design writer Zara Arshad: Design China (Beijing)
Profile
Internationally renowned product and graphic designer Freeman Lau (Lau Siu-Hong), with more than 300 awards to his name, has designed everything from posters and books to prize-winning water bottle packaging and a series of intertwining chairs and stools. He is also recognized for his work as an educator and curator, and in 2011 was a curator of the Beijing International Design Triennial. Lau’s book CMYK (2012) was just released in Hong Kong and Beijing this past December. Design China’s Zara Arshad, in an interview for Designers & Books, sat down with Freeman Lau recently to talk about reading, writing, designing, and publishing books in Hong Kong and mainland China. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 5, 2013

Product/Industrial designer David Weeks: David Weeks Studio (New York)
Profile     Book List
Why do fiction and narrative hold such a great appeal for designers? One well-put answer comes from product designer David Weeks. “Whether it's a minor character in The World According to Garp who has halitosis and is described as ‘dying from the inside out‘ or Sartre’s description of finding his hand on a doorknob in Nausea, the fleeting imagery created from reading a well-written sentence is an act of design in itself.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter February 26, 2013

Architect Jens Holm: HAO/Holm Architecture Office (Copenhagen and New York)
Profile     Book List
“After thousands of years and the recent rise of a multitude of storytelling platforms, books remain for me the single medium that manages to both inform and inspire without dictating a single visual truth or idea,” Danish architect Jens Holm tells Designers & Books. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter February 19, 2013

Design magazine editor Amanda Dameron: Dwell (New York)
Profile     Book List
What books does the editor of a high-profile modern home design magazine read? Designers & Books went to Amanda Dameron, editor in chief of Dwell, to find out. “Last year I moved from the West Coast to New York, and I barely brought any furniture or clothes with me. What I did bring was 50 boxes of books and vintage magazines,” says Dameron. More...