on 14 September 2007
If there were awards for book titles, One Hundred at 360°: Graphic Design’s New Global Generation would be unlikely to trouble the judges. What the authors (a designer and a design journalist) are trying to get across is that they’ve rounded up 100 designers from all around the world. All of these whippersnappers, we’re told, have ‘set up shop’ since the turn of the century, and the introduction muses on how ‘setting up shop’ can mean many different things in our post-salaried portfolio-working society.
It also witters on rather annoyingly about how financial success often isn’t the main motivator for this new generation of practitioners, as if this could mean anything except that they’re having trouble getting paid. By the time they stop being the new generation and have mortgages to feed and kids to pay, they’ll be just as keen on cash as the rest of us, surely? If they really are doing what for anyone who aspires to competence is at least a full-time job just for the love of it, that’s dilettantism, not democratisation.
Anyway, moving swiftly on to the content, this thick, square book is packed with interesting work and demonstrates that if anything unites today’s up-and-coming graphic designers it’s a merciful lack of unity. True, there’s a fair amount of stuff that hasn’t moved on from the 90s – Neue Helvetica, Tom Hingston warpage, complexity fetishist line action – and 21st Century clichés are not unrepresented (yes, there are black-and-white nudes entwined with flowery emo doodlings). But there are some proper new twists on divisionism, welcome rediscoveries of Gilliamesque retro repro cutup, some timeless type, and enough uncategorisable originality to reassure old-timers that standards aren’t falling. One of our favourite pieces is Dress Code’s identity for the MTV Video Music Awards. Is that sad? One of our least favourite is the Excel pixel art. That’s sad.
The captioning is perfunctory and not entirely literate, but in a separate central section each entrant is fully profiled, with contact details, in case you’re inspired to hire any of them instead of just ripping off their ideas.
Taschen’s Contemporary Graphic Design, compiled by regulars Charlotte and Peter Fiell, is a different kind of book altogether. Bound in hard covers with a smart acetate jacket, it’s set in three languages in the kind of tiny and off-puttingly stodgy type more usually found in the less imaginative sort of exhibition catalogue, providing details of and quotes from each contributing designer but in a style that makes you feel tired before you attempt to read anything. The contents listing is even more infuriatingly illegible, and the foreword merely namechecks a standard list of ethical and aesthetic issues without contributing many new thoughts.
This seems like a more comprehensive compendium than the Laurence King title, but in fact features only 15 more names. Most of them are the ones you’d expect: Barnbrook, Büro Destruct (and another three Büros), Farrow, Frost, Fuel, Hughes (Rian), Hyland, KesselsKramer, Lateral, M/M, Me Company, Mevis & Van Deursen, Rinzen, Sagmeister, Saville, The Designers Republic, Why Not Associates… Inevitably, nobody will agree that the selection is definitive – we’ve become mildly obsessed with trying to figure out how someone could decide to include Dávid Földvári while omitting Olivier Kugler – but it’s certainly credible, and there are enough wild cards to avoid complete overlap with your existing coffee-table collection.
Contemporary Graphic Design is not Taschen’s most dazzlingly successful effort, but as usual it’s good value, and if you haven’t got round to investing in any graphics showcase books since about 1997 it’ll sort you out. The main problem is that not very much of the content feels any more contemporary than that. If you’re a jaded creative director in a blue-chip ad agency looking for some tried and tested tropes to appropriate, don’t hesitate to send your intern out for a copy. To get a taste of right now, though, One Hundred at 360° is a better buy.
adambanksdotcom @gbarl Bah, missed your Watchdog. Do they do it on iPlayer?