Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Interviews
By Steve Kroeter March 22, 2012

Graphic designer Paula Scher talks about Maps (Princeton Architectural Press, October 2011), her recent book of map paintings, which was named a Designers & Books Notable Book of 2011 by Alissa Walker, who said, “As art, it’s gorgeous; as a process, it’s a lesson in obsession; and as a narrative, it’s storytelling at its best.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 20, 2012

Product designer Cleto Munari: Cleto Munari Design Associati (Vicenza, Italy)
Profile    Book List
Cleto Munari is a designer and design impresario whose work has an especially close connection with the words of writers. In a recent series of limited-edition tables he produced for his first furnishings collection, he incorporated the language of poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Mark Strand—lines of their poetry as well as their drawings are etched into glass tabletops. More...

Notable Design Books: Reviews
By Erik Spiekermann March 15, 2012

Guest blogger: Erik Spiekermann (Edenspiekermann AG: Berlin)
Profile   Notable Books of 2011
Guest blogger and graphic designer Erik Spiekermann examines a book on the history of modern German thought from all angles, including its ingenious cover design. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 13, 2012

Architect Peter Pennoyer: Peter Pennoyer Architects (New York)
Profile    Book List
“My father, who was on the New York City Art Commission and the Building Committee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” architect and architectural historian Peter Pennoyer tells Designers & Books, “would bring home pamphlets, plans, and even books from hearings and meetings at which the few building projects proposed in the dim days of the late 1960s and early 1970s were under review. I remember in particular the 1971 master plan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. More...

Notable Design Books: Reviews
By Maria Popova March 8, 2012

Guest blogger: Maria Popova (Brain Pickings, New York)
Profile    Notable Books of 2011
Guest blogger Maria Popova—creator of Brain Pickings—looks at George L. Legendre’s recent book, which looks at pasta shapes as design statement. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter March 6, 2012

Graphic designer Gail Anderson: New York
Profile    Book List
Gail Anderson knows type. She’s made it the center of her much-admired work at Rolling Stone magazine and as the Creative Director of SpotCo, an agency specializing in graphic design for the theater world. With Steven Heller she’s written six popular books on type of all kinds, including New Ornamental Type and New Vintage Type. The team has a new book, New Modernist Type, coming out this fall. A recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the AIGA, Anderson is also an in-demand lecturer on graphic design topics. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter February 28, 2012

Architect Craig Hodgetts: Hodgetts + Fung Design and Architecture (Los Angeles)
Profile   Book List
Since the 1970s, when he collaborated with Robert Mangurian in the cutting-edge firm Studio Works, to his talked-about recent installation with partner Hsinming Fung for the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition California Design, 1930–1965 (on view through June 3, 2012, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Craig Hodgetts has pursued a remarkable range of interests. In his architecture, writing, and teaching, he has drawn on automotive and lighting design, information technology, and theater and film, among many other areas. He has, as he says in the introduction to the list he created for Designers & Books, “an appetite for nearly everything I encounter.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter February 21, 2012

Interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber: Bilhuber & Associates (New York)
Profile   Book List
In addition to being an acclaimed interior designer, Jeffrey Bilhuber is an engaging and entertaining storyteller. Designers & Books had the chance to find out firsthand just how engaging and entertaining a storyteller at a recent face-to-face with him in his office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The conversation ranged from an unusual fiction choice on the book list he sent us to why he is getting his preschool son a subscription to National Geographic magazine to what his own library looks like and the thinking behind his latest book. More...

Daily Features
By Alissa Walker February 16, 2012

Guest blogger: Alissa Walker (Los Angeles)
Profile   Notable Books of 2011
Guest blogger Alissa Walker—design and urbanism journalist, critic, and author—talks about why the era of coffee table books bigger than coffee tables is over. More...

Architecture
By Steve Kroeter February 14, 2012

Architect Galia Solomonoff: Solomonoff Architecture Studio (SAS) (New York)
Profile    Book List
The architect Galia Solomonoff, a native of Argentina, traces her attachment to books to a memorable incident: “In 1975, my parents burned a significant and dear part of our library as Isabel Perón signed a number of decrees empowering the military to ‘annihilate’ the Argentine left. It was a Sunday morning in winter. We were at our suburban house on the Paraná River and I was seven. I passed books to my father in silence; we did a barbecue to cover up the burning of the books.” More...