Designers & Books Blog

 

856 blog entries
Rare & Beautiful
By Peter Kraus June 23, 2020

The Russian-born book designer and publisher who went by the name of Iliazd and worked in Paris from the 1920s to the 1970s occupies a unique place in the history of the illustrated book. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter September 27, 2011

Interior designer Penny Drue Baird: Dessins LLC (New York and Paris)
book list
“I made my first trip to Paris when I was 18,” says Penny Drue Baird. “Unlike what all my friends and clients believe, it most certainly did not result in a coup de foudre. It was when I was there about three years later, when I was crazily ‘in love,’ that I became unquestionably addicted to Paris—and, truth be told, especially to those sauces! That was the true beginning of how the City of Light got to be an ongoing part of who I am and what I value.” More...

Product/industrial design
By Steve Kroeter May 7, 2013

Product/industrial designer Fritz Frenkler: f/p design  (Munich, Germany)
Profile     Book List
Fritz Frenkler believes in “universal design”—design for everyone. In fact, he is a founding member of universal design e.V, a Hannover (Germany)-based design think tank and laboratory More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter May 29, 2012

Product designer Sam Hecht: Industrial Facility (London)
Profile   Book List
“I believe that too many designers have lost the ability to realize that projects are ultimately for people—not the company,” states London-based product designer Sam Hecht in a comment on The World as Design, which is on the book list he recently sent Designers & Books. Hecht’s own work, covering kitchenware for Whirlpool, furniture for Herman Miller and Yamaha, and numerous products like appliances and tableware for Muji, is known for its clarity and is definitely “for people” and the lives they live. Design is important, Hecht says, “as a means of simplifying our lives in an inspirational way.” More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter June 14, 2011

Graphic designer Erik Spiekermann: Edenspiekermann AG (Berlin)
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When we talk about the waning of print communication and the waxing of digital communication, one element of the dialogue that retains its importance on both sides of the conversation is typography. . . . Type designers who grew up on print but have successfully migrated to the digital world have had the opportunity to have an outsized impact on contemporary commerce and culture in general, as well as on design in particular. Thus it is fitting that the German Design Council recently awarded Germany’s highest design award, the Lifetime Achievement Award, to Erik Spiekermann. More...

Interviews
By Steve Kroeter December 6, 2011

What happens when a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic meets up with a MacArthur Fellow architect and the topic of their conversation is books? Shortly before it was announced that Jeanne Gang had been named by the MacArthur Foundation as a recipient of one of its 2011 awards, she and Paul Goldberger had a conversation about the book list that Gang submitted to Designers & Books. More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter September 6, 2011

Landscape architect and urban designer Diana Balmori: Balmori Associates (New York)
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Diana Balmori sees landscape architecture as an art that balances formal precision with what she calls the “unfixity” of nature, saying that “there is an element of wildness that needs to enter into our lives.” In her recent book A Landscape Manifesto, she lays out her ideas—which include the philosophical and the poetic—in 25 precisely numbered points. (Three of our favorites, by the way, are #1, “Nostalgia for the past and utopian dreams for the future prevent us from looking at our present”; #23, “The edge between architecture and landscape can be porous”; and #24, “Landscape can be like poetry, highly suggestive and open to multiple interpretations.”) More...

Book List of the Week
By Steve Kroeter October 18, 2011

Architect Tom Kundig: Olson-Kundig Architects (Seattle)
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In the new book Tom Kundig: Houses 2, featuring 17 of architect Tom Kundig’s recent residential designs, the Finnish architect and critic Juhani Pallasmaa’s foreword states that “a great building turns our attention away from itself and makes us experience the world around us with focused and re-sensitized senses and sharpened understanding.” More...

The Proust Questionnaire — Book Edition
By Tony Brook November 4, 2013

The book Tony Brook could never finish, his favorite book character, and 23 more answers to Designers & Books’ special questionnaire. More...

The Proust Questionnaire — Book Edition
By Tom Geismar December 5, 2013

Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv’s Tom Geismar reports that his favorite book character is Babar and that his favorite writer (of the opposite gender) is Jhumpa Lahiri. More of Tom Geismar’s answers to The Proust Questionnaire—Book Edition. More...