The car sums up the contradictions of industrialised age more than any other design object. Simultaneously a symbol of desire, design and engineering brilliance and of over-consumption of resources and destruction of the environment. The subtitle to Stephen Bayley’s Cars (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) comes...

What would Paul Rand have been like as a teacher? He was renowned for his stinging critiques ornery manner, yet in Paul Rand: Conversations with Students (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) Philip Burton chooses the word ‘compassionate’ to describe him. It seems that almost all of Rand’s students have praise for...

Thank you to An Event Apart Seattle who have sponsored The Designer’s Review of Books throughout March. If you enjoyed the review of Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks you can see him live there along with Jared Spool, the man Zeldman, Eric Meyer (who looks slightly shocked in...

(Guest Review by David Sherwin(=) Underwhelmed. We’ve all had this reaction when encountering a product or service that just didn’t cut it. Take, for example, the alarm clock next to my bed. There are two alarm switches side by side: one for me, and one for my wife. Invariably, every morning I hit...

“Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked. If one brings up an idiosyncratic question, the answer he gives will necessarily be unique as well.” – Kenya Hara, Designing Design. This philosophy is the thread that runs through the entire text of Kenya Hara’s deep and thoughtful...

Given that it is a book about classification, Designing Universal Knowledge: The World as Flatland - Report 1 (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) by Gerlinde Schuller is oddly difficult to classify. Schuller is head of the Information Design Studio in Amsterdam and begins the book by reminding us of the...