Bonnie Mak: How the Page Matters (2011)

“From handwritten texts to online books, the page has been a standard interface for transmitting knowledge for over two millennia. It is also a dynamic device, readily transformed to suit the needs of contemporary readers. In How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak explores how changing technology has affected the reception of visual and written information.

Mak examines the fifteenth-century Latin text Controversia de nobilitate in three forms: as a manuscript, a printed work, and a digital edition. Transcending boundaries of time and language, How the Page Matters connects technology with tradition using innovative new media theories. While historicizing contemporary digital culture and asking how on-screen combinations of image and text affect the way conveyed information is understood, Mak’s elegant analysis proves both the timeliness of studying interface design and the persistence of the page as a communication mechanism.”

Publisher University of Toronto Press, 2011
Studies in Book and Print Culture series
ISBN 080209760X, 9780802097606
ix+129 pages

Reviews: Martha W. Driver (Speculum, 2013), Martin G. Eisner (Renaissance Quarterly, 2013), Brett A. Hudson (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2014), Julie Holcomb (Information & Culture, 2012).
Interview with author: Gretchen E. Henderson (Ploughshares Literary Magazine, 2013).

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Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art (1985)

IBM, UPS, ABC. If these acronyms ring a bell, their ubiquitous logos springing instantly to mind, then you know the work of Paul Rand (1914-1996), the Picasso of Graphic Design. A pioneer in the field of visual communication, Rand developed a fresh and individual design language drawn from European art movements including Russian constructivism, de Stijl, and the Bauhaus. His career as an art director, teacher, writer, and design consultant to major corporations spanned almost seven decades. Rand arguably got his start at the tender of 3 when he first began to secretly copy pictures of the attractive Palmolive models pictured in advertising displays in his father’s grocery store in Brooklyn, New York. He later modeled his aesthetic on avant-garde artists like Paul Klee, El Lissitzky, and architect Le Corbusier, each of whom advocated a timeless spirit in design. Rand began his career in an era when working by hand was a given, a reality that would change before his eyes as the mass media, entertainment, and consumer industries were revolutionized by increasingly technical equipment, and ultimately the computer.

Steven Heller, senior art director at The New York Times and prominent author of numerous design books, presents this meticulously researched and detailed survey, which marks the first complete retrospective of Rand’s powerful body of work, exploring the full range of his advertising, publishing, and corporate identity projects. Eminent designer Armin Hofmann writes the forward, and the introduction is penned by advertising legend George Lois, who writes, “The constant concern of the scholarly and humanistic Paul Rand was to create images that snared people’s eyes, penetrated their minds, warmed their hearts and made them act.” Appropriately, the designers of this large, bold, beautifully designed book seem well versed in Randism themselves, creating a gorgeous tribute to this quintessential artist’s artist. Rand’s uncanny ability to inject wit and whimsy into the corporate vocabulary is echoed here, for example, in an enlarged reproduction of an opened children’s book whose spine is aligned with that of the actual book held by the reader, creating a playful trompe l’oeil effect.

Publisher Yale University Press, 1985
ISBN 0300034830, 9780300034837
239 pages

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Jan Tschichold: The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers (1928/1995)

“Since its initial publication in Berlin in 1928, Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography has been recognized as the definitive treatise on book and graphic design in the machine age. At once a key theoretical document of Central European modernism between the world wars and an invaluable source of working principles for the practicing designer, this classic work enjoys the reputation among book artists that Le Corbusier’s Toward a New Architecture has long held among architects.

The book’s legendary renown is certain to increase with the long-overdue appearance of this first English translation, published in a form that reflects Tschichold’s original typography and design. Ranging from theoretical discussions of typography in the age of photography and mechanical standardization to practical considerations in the design of business forms, The New Typography remains essential reading for designers, art historians, and all those concerned with the evolution of visual communication in the twentieth century.”

First published in German as Die neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für Zeitgemäss Schaffende, Bildungs verband der Deutschen Buchdrucker, 1928.

Translated by Ruari McLean
With an Introduction by Robin Kinross
Publisher University of California Press, 1995
A Centennial Book
Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism series, 8
236 pages
via Jindra Kratochvil

Review: Victor Margolin (Print 1996).

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