On and off, I've tended to read quite a bit. So, I thought I'd put up some reviews of books as I read them. In time, I may go back and add reviews of some of the books I read in the past. Not massively exciting, but I suppose it may be of interest to someone, somewhere (perhaps).
Restart: New Systems in Graphics Design - Christian Küsters and Emily King
This is one of those silly graphic design books, all A4 and full colour and full of indecipherableness. In paricular, it's one that looked rather popular and to my taste while browsing Amazon, which subsequently popped up in Galloway & Porter rather cheaply, as possibly damaged (it wasn't).
It is separated into three sections - Code, Generic and Disjunction, and has a thesis something along the lines of 'You've got to have a system'. More specifically, the systems aren't so much in the traditional modernist clean style, but are more like Conway's life - give yourself rules, and then revel in the complexity that can be produced from them.
Overall, it's pretty odd, but works quite well. My favourite section, unsurprisingly, is Code, which blurs the line between programmatically generated stuff, and Art (or, in this case, Graphic Design). The whole thing makes you think quite a bit, for a picture book.
Permalink. Posted 23:46, Wed, 22 Dec 2004.
There is also a complete index of the books.
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