Herb Lubalin

REVIEWS
BY LEWIS BLACKWELL
I have been invited to give some insight into the hot titles for the designer's studio. Indeed the phrase
classics for the bookshelf" was uttered, but I fear it is a little early to identify classics, given the
caveat of drawing on those recently published.
My qualifications for this task are many and varied. For one thing, I read books [no longer to be assumed)
and for another, I write them. I also edit and publish a monthly magazine and a CD-ROM for designers
and thus keep a close eye on the readers' interests and the state of the market. This position provides
me with my chief qualification for the job at hand: the privilege of receiving heaps of review copies, and,
having an expense account for the few things that are not sent in free but are nonetheless desir-
able. Of course, this could be seen as disqualifying me from being at all suitable as I rarely face the
grim challenge of handing over real, non tax deductible money. So bear that in mind as I blithely advise
on how to blow a few hundred dollars.
Faced with such a choice of media, the devising and publishing of books for designers is a strange
business, and getting stranger all the time. A look at the booksellers' sales charts reveals that the
bestsellers are truly Jekyll and Hyde in their split nature. I'll let you decide which is the civilized
side, which the monster.
At one extreme there are the ever-more numerous doorstop-sized software manuals, usually with
thin soft covers but quite often at a hard-cover price. This premium pricing is questionably justi-
fied by the insertion of a CD-ROM inside the back cover, which carries a clutch of stuff you could
have downloaded off the Internet. Well, at least it saves on the phone bill. Such books are almost
invariably printed monochrome on something slightly worse than standard photocopier paper.
Which is fine, as the book is almost out-of-date by the time you get it home, such is the pace of
software updates. No sooner have you absorbed those quick key combinations for snappy effects
in Fontastic 4.5, than a mailer arrives advising that your life is but a squalid struggle to survive
without full knowledge of Fontastic 4.6.
Enough of that side of the market. The other extreme of designer book publishing is where the fun
begins, fueled by tradition, new media and the vague belief that designers can't read anyway. This
other extreme is that of books not as manuals, but as cultural artifacts pumping out inspiration, pro-
paganda, and whatever else turns you on. It is where classics, if they lurk anywhere, might be found.
I have to admit to a sense of having exploited this area myself, notably with THE END OF PRINT
(Laurence King/Chronicle), which I wrote around the work of David Carson. Our publishers advise
us this is the fastest selling, or even the best-selling, design book in the history of the universe, but
we are not exactly talking airport bookstall sales. However, the 120,000 or so out there include many
copies, I suspect, that are well-thumbed but largely unread. While young designers work hard at
acquiring the grace notes of David's graphics, fewer explore the readability of the longer texts. And
that's fine by me: I've plenty of books on my shelves that are still unread, but may be one day
(Finnegan's Wake and its 65 languages might have to hang on for a while longer).
That many people choose to read books at best in a haphazard fashion is not necessarily some-
thing to despair about as if it is inevitably a problem, but rather to understand. I fear Robert
Bringhurst's THE ELEMENTS OF TYPOGRAPHIC STYLE (Hartley & Marks) is part of the problem
rather than the solution. It is now in a second edition, suggesting it is some kind of hit, but its
preachy self-righteous manner and stuffy design leave me cold. The least you expect of tradi-
tional book design is that the margins are decent so that the text doesn't disappear into the spine.
Somebody out there might be benefit from the facts, factoids and feisty opinions of Bringhurst,
but I'll have to pass. It is occasionally amusing for the fatuous nature of some of the advice, always
summarized in neatly numbered maxims, such as: "6.2.2. Choose faces that can furnish whatever
special effects you require." And don't forget to wash behind your ears. That said there are many
practical points to chew on...perhaps it should be commended to all students and young designers
as an object suitable for deconstruction.
And that buzzword brings me onto my favorite graphics book-as-object of recent months, PROCESS
(Thames & Hudson). This is an object assembled by Tomato, the very trendy London-based collective
of designers, filmmakers, musicians, illustrators and more. It is not a book about design, but in its
fractured typography and abstract imagery it explores process in art and communication. This book
establishes certain ideas about the preoccupations of designers at this time. It mixes paper stocks and
has an understated cover—little points that I love as I can just sense the production and sales directors
in the publishing company twitching over these departures from convention and economy. There are
texts, often quite lateral to each other, which repay reading. The fractured bits of type, too, are broken poems
of variable quality. There is spread after spread of meaningful/meaningless abstract digital stuff, with
some recognizable imagery...well, have a look. I liked it, many won't. It's a bit like a piece of music, or a
Continued on page 40
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