on 6 September 2002This round-up of mostly recent British design is edited by John Sorrell, the industry’s grand wizard du jour, and the jacket biog may as well read ‘John Sorrell is very pleased with himself’. He has every right to be, but the book, too, seems uncomfortably smug and posh. With a few deliberate exceptions, such as William Welch’s easy-grip cutlery made from flour and balloons, most things here are either grands projets or high-priced luxury goods.
Still, they’re all good, and each is described by its designer in a questionless interview format, which proves both readable and informative. Not all the selections are familiar, and even the most obvious are made striking by the interdisciplinary context: Lambie-Nairn’s BBC2 idents alongside Freda Sack’s Yellow Pages typeface and Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge. Graphics and illustration are woefully under-represented, however, and Alan Kitching’s letterpress London Marathon poster hardly represents the cutting edge.
The book itself, leaving aside the cover’s questionable use of Ireland as blank space for type, is simply and beautifully designed (Quentin Newark and Untitled’s Glenn Howard are credited). Now let’s have the street version.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper