Book Groups
AIGA Boston's Book Group meets every six weeks to discuss a wide selection of books from the world of design and designers.
Our members suggest books, and vote on the book to be read and discussed in the next gathering.
If you would like to suggest a book to be read and discussed by the Book Group, we welcome you to do so by emailing Safoura Rafeizadeh at srafeiza@bu.edu.
We always meet on a Wednesday evening from 7:00 - 9:00 pm in a local restaurant to discuss our books. These meetings are lively, casual, and friendly. In addition to discussing the book, we exchange ideas and information about being designers in our time.
For more information on the book group, please contact Safoura Rafeizadeh at srafeiza@bu.edu. If you'd like to start and run a group in an area outside of Boston, please contact our Director of Community Development, Matthew Bacon, community_outreach@boston.aiga.org.
Our last meeting was to discuss the 27th book we have read, Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design, by Ellen Lupton.
We are now reading our 28th book, Hand Job: A Catalog of Type. By Chen Design Associates.
On Wednesday, July 21, we will meet at the Audubon Circle to discuss Hand Job: A Catalog of Type.
Book Group Member Review
Design/ Writing/ Research: Writing on Graphic Design
Published by Phaidon
Review by Joanna Rieke
April 2010
Forget Jeff Koons, David Byrne, or Dan Deacon. Whenever I mention I went to MICA, people always ask, “doesn’t Ellen Lupton teach there?” I’m not surprised this is their first question since she is such an influential part of the MFA Design Program, along with an engaging advocate for the autodidact, converting the public into producers with her D.I.Y. books. On top of that, she designs, writes, and well, researches exhibitions as a curator for the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum.
I’m glad that this month we picked her sturdy series of articles bolted together in Design Writing Research. Judging from the title, (also the name of her former blog and studio with Abbott Miller from 1985) writing is, quite literally, central to her work. Rick Poynor wrote in the introduction that, “designers who write about design are increasingly anxious to design what they write.” Lupton continues in this lineage of writer-designers from Lubalin, Lustig, and Sadek who fuse form and content, text and image.
Smart in Scala, her investigation into our reading of signs from post-structuralism, punctuation, and pictographs eloquently unifies what is discussed with the way it is written. Warhol’s soup cans mirror a repetitive layout of epigrams just as a playful essay on Otto Neurath scatters logographs throughout. The book would please anyone passionate about etymology, semantics, and the history of symbols. While you don’t need a PhD in Linguistics to be a great designer, it would be helpful to understand the history and theory behind our practice. A reading of the monumental History of Graphic Design by Phillip Meggs would certainly compliment the work in here.
It’s interesting to look back at this book considering it’s been nearly twenty years since the heyday of post-structuralism. Turning the pages of McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage still feel as disjunctive as flipping TV channels, but the attempts to sling printer’s ink to the fan do not appear as revolutionary to the millennium generation. True, the frame always matters. Oh, how we admire a flower if it’s in a bouquet! But as each medium quickly becomes obsolete, the message must continually transcend the mode of dissemination to stand the test of time.
The concern now is for content, rather than the container, but our conversation constantly returned to the way we interact with information. Meeting on the eve of the health care bill to chat about this book, we couldn’t help but express our frustrations with sound bites, twitter updates, and the monkey mind of noisy media. We half-seriously joked that Robert Mankoff’s eye-tracking device would help designers better understand how to guide readers through visually cluttered news sites. With the rise of infotainment, the essay on USA Today’s re-design struck us as ever-poignant.
“Will the iPad be today’s McPaper?” we mused. Watching Charlie Rose toy with the electronic etch-a-sketch on the night of the release was bizarre. It’s unclear if this is the end of an era or a beginning. Yes, there’s the promise of print design without warming up the ink heads. A possible revival of long form journalism too. But will book collectors marvel at their, um, digital ‘bookshelf’ and the next generation of scholars sunburn their eyes to scroll through War and Peace? Progress is two steps forward and one step back. The age of The Grey Lady may never return, but Sundays will largely remain the same whether or not we turn in our laptops for an “app-top.”
Another eye-raising discussion centered on design and it’s place in the arts. In the chapter comparing fine art with line art, Lou Dorfsman criticized Warhol for traversing both worlds, which came off as absurd to us today. Sure, there’s the old, elitist hierarchy to the arts: painting (the sacred sect), illustration (interlopers), and design (commercial bottom-feeders). Thankfully Lupton emphasizes that design is a discipline in its own right, but not a closed club. I remember in school, painters made posters for their band, sculptors built their own websites, and illustrators marketed their own zines. While nothing is clear cut, we agreed design shouldn’t be a blender. One part Art Deco, two parts de Stijl, add a dash of Dada and viola! This debased referencing is incestuous and doesn’t contribute anything new. With all the versatile talent and convergence of media, the advice to “stick to your schtick” is unimaginable.
Published in 1996, this book came out when people used Palm Pilots and Adam Gopnik was still an art critic. Looking at the cover by Mike Mills, the wooden dolls (is that Abbott and Ellen or Adam and Eve?) make me nostalgic for the Girl Skateboarding campaign. Although most of the topics in this book still stand, I was fortunate Lupton generously updated us our recent observations:
JR: You mention how TV changed the way readers approach printed matter and I realize this was before online media, but do you find that we're in danger of becoming "over-sensed" by the immense output of news outlets? Can design help create a point of entry for readers?
EL: TV has become more and more designed, more and more typographic. And the quality is often very high (along with the rising quality of the programming). I am often amazed even when watching ads how much typography ?is happening on the screen (catching the eye when the sound is off). For better or worse, we live in a culture that has become more typographic, not less, with the explosion in media.
?JR: It seems that language evolved from creating organic symbols rooted in the actual towards creating complex, arbitrary signs that stand in for the actual. Will this disconnect always exist and is the role of the designer to try to "close the gap" and get back to the hieroglyphic model?
EL: Being able to merge the hieroglyphic with the abstract is one of the great opportunities of graphic design. But I don't think that hieroglyphic or pictorial communication is more important than the abstract systems that we also create. Grids, interfaces, hierarchies--all that is in the realm of abstraction, and without them, we don't have a discipline.
?JR: I find that most of my design ideas start with a play on words, metaphors, and figures of speech, rather than imagery. If art can be literal and writing pictorial, how does the interplay between these two disciplines inform one another.
EL: More than any other visual art, graphic design is closely intertwined with writing and verbal language. Indeed, they can't really be separated. We deal with words all the time.??
JR: After Bauhaus, de Stijl, and Modernism, designers veered away from geometry towards humanist design, blending art history with vernacular culture. Today, it seems there's a similar shift where designers are becoming web developers, illustrators designing hand-lettering, and painters illustrating. Are we in the midst of a return to humanist design?
??EL: I hope so! Design has become human-centered and also more democratic, open, and accessible.??
Book Group Member Review
Designers Don't Read
Copyright 2009 by Austin Howe
Published by Allworth Press
Review by Nico Alba
Designers Don’t Read in January
“At the beginning I thought, 'Whoa – this is very nice.' And then I think, 'This is complete garbage.’ And then I change my mind,” – this said of January’s book of the month for the AIGA book group. The author of this fitting quote and leader of the group, Safoura Rafeizadeh, is a rare woman in the foggy dawn of the design community’s climb out of the recession. Her ever-buoyant enthusiasm for life, her humor in discovery and her passion for all things design sets the foundation for the evening’s conversation. We are seated at a table for six, in a yellow-y lit bar, on a street not far from Fenway Park at seven o’clock in the evening. The bar notably features several mounted pigs’ heads, exceedingly powerful hand-dryers and pink soap in the bathroom, a couple of girls playing Scrabble next to us, at least one very entertaining conversation, and Stella on tap (this may be my favorite part, aside from the conversation). They did have other things on tap – Safoura and her Guinness kept pace with me and my Stellla(s) most of the evening.
Several copies of the book of the month sit scattered before us on the table. Austin Howe’s Designers Don’t Read is quite the catchy title, and the cover may be even catchier. With those big yellow words in their Helvetica-reminiscent block letters – the lines crossing through each one, and white space you’d like to swim laps in, it is a book begging to be read… And so, in this nasty month of January, we did. Well, aside from those of us who didn’t, which was at least two. Including myself – we have excuses*.
Regardless of these facts, the conversation makes us lean over the table to hear and makes us rock back away from it to laugh. It happens to be the day Apple has released the iPad and we talk of this: “Can you imagine when they get this thing to have the Adobe Suite on it?! It’ll be like a designer’s tablet sans monitor!). And we talk of the fact that everything, everything is going to be Flash: “Holy shit! Really?” (I think that was me.) Safoura mentions in her beautiful Persian accent some inspired words about our design programs being our instruments, not our tools, and mentions also the strange and somewhat hilarious fact that “back in the day” the people who made the four-color separation plates at the printers were called “strippers”… We could talk for hours more about this evening, about holographic business cards and other feats of human ingenuity, but we move on – mostly because Safoura’s copy of Designers Don’t Read is marked with about 50 cut-up sticky notes.
Things we decide about this book:
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The first thing we like is the set of pages featuring shades of gray and the amount of time we should ponder their beauty. As we lean and ponder again, one member of the evening, a designer / teacher in Boston, comments on the entire visual section. He certainly likes it: “Some of the other stuff is surface and trite… Pedantic."
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We decide the title is a cheap but ridiculously effective marketing ploy. It has very little, if anything to do with the contents of the book.
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The value of the contents of the book is questionable. Interesting: yes. Entertaining: yes. Clever: yes, yes. Valuable to survival as a learn-ed designer: maybe not.
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We find it irritating that Howe mentions the names of many advertising companies but never mentions the names of any of the incredibly gifted, genius, fabulous, fantastic, professional, Top” designers he’s worked with. Where did he get them and when are they going to make a “Top Designer” show to go with “Top Chef”?
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We disagree about whether Design Within Reach makes good furniture or just offers copies of stuff that was genius 90 years ago. We also disagree about whether you can define Modernism.
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We agree that the pigs’ heads on the walls in this bar are weird. But we’ve gotten off track again.
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We decide Howe’s thesis is that advertising people and designers need to be friends. That he thinks ad agencies are generally evil and should treat their designers like the gold that they are. Actually, not just be friends but merge, be… ONE. Like Doctor Bronner’s Castile Soap. (If you have not seen these labels, please stop here for a googling moment.)
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We decide that it’s in some way true: Designers don’t read. Our job is to see. “Graphic designers are visual people. I could have this book in my bedroom and be looking at this title for months and not know what it says… I force myself to read it,” Safoura says.
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We like that Howe tells us exactly how much time we are to spend on each chapter.
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We like the way the book was written – that it began as a series of essays sent each Monday morning to his elusive “Top” designers.
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We also like that we are given several minutes to cut out the scissors in the back and that he caringly provides a pair for lefties…
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We think the ruler/bookmark should have come first so that we knew it was there and could use it as a bookmark. So: if you are about to read this book, LISTEN HERE: There is a ruler/bookmark in the back that you can cut out and use as a bookmark (not really as a ruler though...)
And then I am lucky. Because after everyone leaves and my someone special shows up, our attentive waiter sporting the rockabilly hair keeps on being attentive and I get the pleasure of discussing many other books and things with Safoura. These I have decided are mostly secret, but I will give you titles worth looking for (or looking at if you are truly a designer who doesn’t read): The Foreskin’s Lament (cover: worth looking at), Sum (cover: meh), Palimpsest (cover: read back), See Me Like This (cover: not yet in existence, please see me if you would like to be my publisher), and finally a book that should be written – this about the interconnecting lives of Rilke, Salomé, and Nietzsche** and featuring cameos of Rodin, Tolstoy and Freud (cover: someone please ask me to design this).
All in all, the time was the best I’ve spent on one thing in a long while – I could have done without the distracting pigs’ heads, but the conversation was as sparkling and refreshing as the Stella…(s). I can’t wait for next month’s crowd (are you coming?), next month’s meeting and for all the time spent anticipating it while reading Dreary February’s selection: the not-dreary Ellen Lupton’s Design Writing Research..
* Neither the girl sitting next to me (who is very talented and who gave me her card and who if you are looking for a young, eloquently-speaking print designer you should Google: Joanna Rieke. And then look at her amazing illustrations) nor I knew about the book group until the day before. Adding to the irony of the situation is that both of us happen to be designers who actually love to read, and even write, a lot.
** Please tell me if you are going to write this book because I would like to read it. It is too much work to figure out all through Wikipedia.
Book Group Member Book Review
Inside | Outside: From the Basics to the Practice of Design
Second Edition
Copyright 2006 by Malcolm Grear
Published by New Riders
in association with AIGA
Review by Safoura Rafeizadeh
Inside | Outside is a rare book of delightful honesty. It is refreshing to see that Malcolm Grear presents design using visual parameters. Consequently he maintains dignity for himself, his students, and his readers.
In writing on design, claiming to translate the "visual" to "verbal" defies the intricacies of each medium. In addition, versions of a "twelve-step system" for success, places the abstract concept of creativity against the pragmatism of "happy relations with clients." Attempts at both are doomed to fail the test of honesty. Inside | Outside stands above these issues with its honest premise, rare and refreshing.
Even in interesting books like With a Smile in Mind, a sound "verbal" concept becomes blurred and void of much meaning in its "visual" translation. Yet the book force-fits the visuals into its verbal categories; short of Malcolm Grear's delightful honesty.
Another battle can be observed in books like How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, juxtaposing creativity and business success. This results in admitted contradiction, followed by forced rationalization; again, short of honesty.
From its start, Inside | Outside takes the high road of simple honesty: "Art is a verb, design is a verb. Objects result, of course. But for the designer, the act of designing is the point; it is this action that must be studied and practiced and enjoyed for its own sake." How delightful, indeed. We designers do not need to apologize for our profession. We do not need to fear for the loss of our souls. We can simply enjoy designing. (Thank you, Malcolm.)
The fruit of decades of teaching, Inside | Outside presents design projects simple enough that their full complexity is rather tangible. As a result, unlike books which provoke oohs and aahs, we are engaged with concrete design concepts. We know the design objectives, what to watch for, and the significance of the challenge.
He emboldens us, as his students, with the possibility of achieving more than we ever thought possible. This is done by presenting a perspective of step-by-step evolution. He suggests that we trust our intuition, but not rely on it. Lovely advice that is simple, but does not simplify.
As I was sneaking out of a recent conference because I could not stand yet another sales talk, I recalled: "Just like what you do, and do it well." I then walked out with firm steps.
Book after book places the graphic designer against the client, with patronizing suggestions such as "Listen to the client." Inside | Outside places the designer in a choreographed dance with writers, photographers, illustrators, editors. Amazingly, happy relations with clients ensue. His story is the testimony.
Even stories of his callow youth are empowering with the bold humor of telling a know-it-all client: "You design it, I will bill you for it." Now he thinks: "If I do my job well, I can learn from the client and the client can learn from me." And then he explains what it means to do a job well.
Malcolm speaks of problem solving, but presents a profound philosophy we can design by, and live by. "If it [design] is approached as art, a certain dignity can be sustained to help ward off the venalities of the marketplace." "...to reveal photographic forms, not to display pictures." "There really is a universe in a grain of sand." "The strongest statements are the simplest." "Constraints become the mother of invention."
I salute his Father for his advice, and congratulate Malcolm for tolling the bell of honesty. We should all read Inside | Outside to protect our souls! Plus, it is fun and inspiring, with amazing works and solid design objectives.
The book itself is designed nicely, with respect and consideration of composition, good text type, column width responding to content (narration versus instruction). But despite the splendor, and how taken I am, I cannot forgive hyphenating the ragged text, placing text columns close to the binding, and using narrower columns for narrative text in the second half of the book.
A call for a divorce? No, at least he's honest. And we all should keep a man who is loyal to an object that resembles a heart, although an upside-down one!
Books read by this group:
Nozone IX, Empire
By Nicholas Blechman
The Making of 30 Extraordinary Graphic Designers
By Stefan Bucher
Chip Kidd, Book One
By Chip Kidd
A Smile In Mind
By Beryl McAlhone & David Stuart
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
By Scott McCloud
About Looking
By John Berger
How to Be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul
By Adrian shaughnessy
Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time
By Natalia Ilyin
The Uncommon life of Common Objects
By Akiko Busch
Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility
By Steven Heller & Veronique Vienne
Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age
By Steven Heller & Mirko Ilic
Cradle to Cradle
By William McDonough & Michael Braungart
The Learners
By Chip Kidd
Things I Have Learned
By Stefan Sagmeister
Fingerprint: The Art of Using Handmade Elements in Graphic Design
By Chen Design Associates
Making Magazines
By AIGA Fresh Dialogue Seven/New Voices in Graphic Design
Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failures & Lessons Learned
By Steven Heller
Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America
By Warren Lehrer & Judith Sloan
VAS: An Opera in Flatland
By Steve Tomasula & Stephen Farrell
DIY: Design It Yourself
By Ellen Lupton
The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics
By Milton Glaser
No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism
By Rick Poynor
The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration
By Seymour Chwast
Designers Don’t Read
By Austin Howe
Design Writing Research
By Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller
The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Piublic Places.
By: David Gibson.
Skin: Surface, Substance & Design
By Ellen Lupton
Hand Job: A Catalog of Type
By Chen Design Associates (Author), Michael Mabry (Foreword)
Books nominated but not selected:
The Art of Looking Sideways
By Alan Fletcher
Graphic Design Time Line: A Century of Design Milestones
By Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit
Geography of Home
By Akiko Busch
Nine Ways to Cross a River
By Akiko Busch
The Laws of Simplicity
By John Maeda
What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design
By Peter-Paul Verbeek
Inside / Outside: From the Basics to the Practice of Design
By Malcolm Grear
Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
By Michael Bierut, Steven Heller
Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
By Michael Bierut, Steven Heller
Looking Closer 3: Classic Writings on Graphic Design
By Michael Bierut, Steven Heller
Looking Closer 4: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
By Michael Bierut, Steven Heller
Looking Closer 5: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
By Michael Bierut, Steven Heller
The Brand Gap: Revised Edition
By Marty Neumeier
How to Grow as a Graphic Designer
By Catharine Fishel
New Masters of Poster Design: Poster Design for the Next Century
By John Foster
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