Design: Intelligence Made Visible
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Hardcover
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Book Details
Written by Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran.
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($49.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
Essential facts, authoritative opinions and a provocative list of the most influential designers.
Design: The Definitive Directory of Modern Design is a dynamic and comprehensive guide to the subject. Global in scope, this book includes architecture, industrial design, furniture, fashion, cars, clothing, graphics, consumer products, signs and much more -- all complemented by 300 color photographs. There are also up-to-date profiles of the innovators and visionaries past and present whose achievements have forever changed the way we view ourselves and the world.
A series of essays outlines the role of design in modern cultural history and includes Terence Conran's definition of design. The main section of the book is an A-Z directory of the most influential people, products and processes of the past and present centuries and includes biographies of leading designers. The authors also share their personal views on today's newest achievers.
Among the topics examined:
- Art, industry and the beginnings of design
- The consumer age and mass consumption
- The craft ideal of old values
- The Modern movement and the romance of the machine
- America of the thirties
- Italy since the fifties
- Symbolism, the language of objects and consumer psychology
- Postmodern design, and looking to the future.
Up to date, provocative and completely original, Design will be a sourcebook for professional designers, an essential guide for students of design, and a revelation for general readers hungry for information about design and designers.
Highlights:
- 100-page A-Z directory for easy look-up
- 300 full-color illustrations with detailed captions
- Biographies of designers past and present
- Corporate histories and product appraisals
- The influence of management, cultural and social theories
- Michelin-style ratings of today's up-and-coming designers
- Brand identity and assessing brand value
- The newest types and categories of design.
The featured subjects include, among many others:
- Bauhaus
- IBM
- Sony
- Benetton
- iPod
- Tom Wolfe
- Charles Eames
- Italy's Autostrade
- Victorinox
- Eric Gill
- Philippe Starck
- Vogue
- Ferrari
- Porsche
- Walt Disney
- Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Excellent.
This is an enormous A-Z encyclopedia of 20th (and 21st) century design primarily in Europe and North America. Other than a couple extended photo essays about American and Italian design in the post WWII years, the book really is an alphabetical listing of all the major designers, products, and movements in the design world. There are hundreds of photos - several on each page.
I was struck by the continuity of design in the past 100 years, especially in architecture, furniture, and interior design. Most of what we take to be 'modern' today springs directly from the ideas of the 1920s; and what must have seemed at that time as radical differences between design movements (Bauhaus, art-deco, etc.) have now been merged into a cohesive, mass-produced whole.
With rare exceptions, design seems to have reached a kind of peak in the late 50s. The book had a definite 'center of gravity' around 1960 - most of the really extraordinary examples of design had been done by then, and most of what came after was either a direct copy of the design of that period, or was of clearly inferior quality. There are exceptions, of course. The iMac and iPod designs stand out. But the period from 1946 to 1960 was a time of amazing design across all genres from vehicles to architecture to dinnerware.
The book works well as an overview, and is an excellent photo-sampler of the past century of design. It might have been improved with a little more analysis (or at least opinion) about why certain designs worked and others didn't. And a little deeper discussion of the design process and how important designers dealt with constraints would have been interesting. But it is already a very large book - too large and too to hold comfortably for any period of time.