For a chance to win please answer the question below:

Which practice has reworked the interior of the Swiss Church in London’s Covent Garden, London?
Email your answer to dannielle.price@ribabookshops.com by September 15th 2010. A winner will be drawn at random

Books in the prize draw are

The BIID Interior Design Job Book
Stephen Yakeley and Diana Yakeley

The BIID Interior Design Job Book is the first book to set out the professional standard for running an interior design project. Suitable for all interior designers – whether working alone or as part of a design team, and on projects of all sizes – it provides guidance for every stage of a job, from appraisal of the client’s requirements through to practical completion and payment.

Set out as a step-by-step process which dovetails with the standard procedures used by architects and contractors, it is full of practical advice and includes model letters and specimen forms which can be quickly adapted to any job in question. It also contains guidance to the legal background, a clause-by-clause explanation of the standard form of client contract, as well as an introduction to space planning. Fully endorsed by the British Institute of Interior Design, the Job Book will bring a professional rigour to the way projects run and is vital for achieving a professional edge in a competitive field.


Timeless Interiors

The new Home series from Beta-Plus invites you to take a fascinating journey through the most beautiful and inspiring interiors. The thirty volumes in this series are thematically divided by room (living rooms, bathrooms, kitchens and so on), and also by style (including designer homes, country houses and contemporary interiors). The reports in these books combine to create a unique voyage of discovery through modern trends in decoration and architecture, reflecting the lifestyle and outlook of people who live in these beautiful homes. “Home” series is a unique collection of thirty titles, eclectic and stylish, devoted to interior design and decoration, and presented in a handy format. Every book shows the finest projects by leading architects and interior specialists, in a kaleidoscope of styles and genres, and is packed with ideas for your own home. Volume 27 of the “Home” series offers a pictorial tour through every room in the house, illustrating a stunning collection of ‘timeless’ modern architectural and interior design projects.

Colour + Design: Transforming Interior Space

This new title presents colour theory in terms of design principles such as balance, rhythm, emphasis, proportion, unity, and variety. The text is infused with insights into how people perceive colour, and helps the young interior designer focus on the user experience of a space. The text shows how important colour is in the grand scheme of interior design, and how early in the planning process colour should be considered. Original illustrations showing residential, corporate, hospitality, retail, medical, educational and dining are included.

Thomas Feichtner: Edge to Edge. Experimental Design

Thomas Feichtner (b. 1970) is an Austrian designer who, after considerable successes in the field of industrial design (ski bindings, ball-point pens, fire extinguishers), has recently begun to turn heads again with his unusual approach to design. His new work in the area of furniture and object design is positioned midway between industry and handicrafts, mass production and one-of-a-kinds. This monograph uses sketches, preliminary models, and prototypes to provide a detailed presentation of his experimental working methods. With texts by Peter Noever, Bernhard E. Bürdek, Shonquis Moreno, Lilli Hollein, and Michael Hausenblas. – Feichtner lives and works in Linz; since October 2009, he has held a design chair at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule (Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design) in Kiel.

The Furniture of Carlo Mollino

The book presents Mollino’s complete furniture and interior design for the first time and represents the most comprehensive record today of this part of Mollino’s production. Realized in collaboration with the Museo Casa Mollino and written by the museum’s curators Napoleone Ferrari and Fulvio Ferrari, this extensive and original monograph emphasizes the contemporary significance of Mollino’s groundbreaking oeuvre.

www.ribabookshops.com

Patrick Cramsie’s book entitled The Story of Graphic Design, is a must for those working in the creative industries. It blends both detailed historical references and showcases our modern interpretations of font, some no less than a decade old, but in our ‘i-Everything’ world, the images slip by, and are forgotten way too easily. This thorough book brings to life a broad range of graphic thought from the invention of writing to the birth of digital design. Our interview will be uploaded in two parts, with a new set of images from the book added each day, to wet your appetite and accompany the article.

Corridor’s Phil Nutley and Chris Inkpen caught up with Patrick and asked him a few questions for Despoke.

1. The British Library’s design archives must have been a real joy to search. How did you begin the task of sifting through so much material?

The British Library holds some 150 million items. The oldest of them are about 3,000 years old and the range of items covers almost every country and language since biblical times. Included in its collection are some of the most celebrated publications in existence: the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the world’s most beautiful books, or even works of art; Magna Carta, a single hand-written sheet that has become a cornerstone of liberty in the English-speaking world; and a copy of one of Gutenberg’s Bibles, the world’s first mass-produced book (all three items appear in my book). Because the Library has no design archive as such – the collection is just too broad and deep to be categorized in that way – and because there is such a head-spinning array of things to choose from, I had to work out an efficient way of selecting the items I would write about. (The aim I had set for my book was to tell the ‘story’ of graphic design largely through a sequence of images.)

Fortunately, the Library’s publishing department has produced an amazing list of publications over several decades, and many of these books are illustrated with beautiful images from the Library’s collection. I was given free access to all of these books and so could benefit from this wonderfully scholarly selection. Any items I came across and wanted in my book I could have. My next step was to look for items illustrated or mentioned in other books, books I was reading while researching the text. Because the Library’s collection is so vast, a good number of the pages or covers of books or magazines I had seen were held in the Library. (As well as a remarkable collection of illuminated manuscripts and early twentieth-century Russian Contructivist books, the Library also has a huge collection of maps, newspapers and magazines).

I could confirm that they were in the collection by looking at the Library’s on-line catalogue. This then gave me the rare privilege of being able to call up the particular item, look at it closely, specify a particular page or spread and then have it expertly photographed by the Library’s staff photographers. What was invaluable in gathering all this picture material, both from within the Library and from other sources, was to have two of the Library’s amazingly knowledgeable and professional picture researchers, Sally Nicholls and Kate Hampson. I couldn’t have got hold of all the pictures without them.

2. Did the design of the front cover of the book cause a debate?

The short answer is yes. None of the initial cover designs I submitted were accepted, so I did some others which, as I saw it, were exploratory. They were made to get an idea of what the publishers (there were two of them, The British Library, the UK publisher, and Abrams, who published the book in the US) were looking for. The British Library chose one of these exploratory designs, which had a colourful typographic background and large white letters (it made the title legible when shown as a small thumbnail image on a web page as well as among the crowded shelves of a book shop). Abrams produced their own design, a more radical approach, which showed the title and the author’s name written backwards, though, interestingly, both could be read easily. The design emphasized the conventionalized nature of graphic design – there is no intrinsic reason, as far as I know, why we shouldn’t read from right to left – and it did so in a way that surprised and intrigued the viewer. I do still hope that my preferred design, one of the designs from the initial set I submitted, might eventually see the light of day; in a future edition perhaps.

3. We’re fast moving towards a post-western world. How do you see the Asian pictographic tradition influencing the future?

I’m sorry to say that I’m not really qualified to comment on the Asian pictographic tradition. Even though I worked for an Anglo-Japanese design company for over seven years, which brought me into contact with many people from Japan – both colleagues and clients – and which allowed me to spend a little time in Japan, I never learnt to speak more than a few stock phrases of Japanese (my accent was apparently quite good, though rather feminine, which people found amusing). And in order to understand any kind of graphic tradition, picto- or otherwise, I think it is necessary to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of that tradition’s writing. Written words are one of the twin pillars of all forms of graphic communication (the other being pictures). Most writing contains characters that are truly pictographic in the sense that they are shapes derived from simple pictures of things. And word-like pictographs are used for all kinds of signs and symbols in everyday life: a suitcase for the baggage carousel at an airport, money for a bureau de change, etc. These word-like symbols combine with writing and other pictures to form a graphic tradition. So, without an understanding of writing and, by extension, the language it represents, it’s not possible to have a meaningful understanding of a particular graphic tradition. Another difficulty about commenting on an Asian tradition is that there really is no single tradition that we can call Asian. Sixty per cent of the world’s population live in Asia and within this vast group there are, of course, a variety of languages, many different writing systems, and a multitude of cultural traditions.

That we in the West sometimes think of other people in very broad terms, such as ‘Asian’, is entirely natural, but clearly the graphic tradition of someone in Mumbai will differ markedly to that of someone in Osaka or Jakarta, so it’s hard to speak about this aspect of Asian culture in very general terms. A further difficulty with the question is that I’m not sure a ‘post-western world’ is so certain (we’ve not yet entered the ‘para-western’ world, which would likely precede a ‘post-western’ one). In graphic design, as in so many other areas of culture, the general direction of influence still is very much from West to East. Eastern businesses, for example, tend to mimic the graphic conventions of the West more than Western ones do of the East (as far as I am aware). One reason for this, presumably, is the ever-growing prominence of the English language. Across the world more and more people are choosing English as a second language – it is now truly the global language – and naturally they take on many of the graphic conventions that come with our alphabet and the Western writing system. Despite all of the above, there are some examples of ‘Asian’ influence in Western graphic design. One possible example, which I find interesting, is the logo for the 2010 London Olympics. Although it seems to be unpopular with many in the media I think it might be doing its job much better than people give it credit for. One of the main tasks of a logo is to appeal to a target audience.

Clearly, the target audience for London’s often-called ‘legacy games’ is young people. It is reasonable to presume then that the logo’s styles of lettering, which make up the stacked numerals ‘20’ and ‘12’, and also the smaller word ‘London’, were chosen because it was thought they would appeal to young people. But this graffiti/comic book kind of lettering didn’t just have to appeal to young people in the West. The success of the last Olympics in China showed how popular the Olympics has become in the East, so young Asians also have to be spoken to by the logo. Now, I don’t know what went through the particular designer’s mind when the logo was being created, but as well its cartoon-like lettering appealling to young Asians, the compound nature of the logo – the fact that its shape is made out of four elements, the numerals – would make it familiar to many Asian readers. Chinese writing in particular includes many characters that are clearly made by a combination of other simpler characters. They are grouped together to make a single shape much like the 2010 Olympic logo is. Because these kinds of Chinese characters are also used in Japanese and Korean writing, the concept of a compound character is familiar to most Asians. It would be interesting to find out whether they found the logo more meaningful or approachable as a result.

Watch out for Part two of the interview coming next week

Meet the authors at various events in September:


FOCUS 2010 at Chelsea Harbour Design Centre
Diana Yakeley and Stephen Yakeley will be talking about their new book and also signing copies.
Designing by the Book Tuesday 28 September

Professional Practice Seminar hosted by idFX. Interior designer and architect duo Diana and Stephen Yakeley discuss the professional standards for running an interior design project. Discover how to win work, avoid disputes and payment problems in a competitive market
Time: 11am Location: SPACE, Third floor, South Dome, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 0XEDesign

MEET THE AUTHOR
Tuesday 28 September, 12.30pm
Book Signing: Interior designer Diana Yakeley and architect Stephen Yakeley sign copies of The BIID Interior Design Job Book Location: RIBA Bookshop, Ground floor, North Dome, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 0XE

Including detailed reports by experts in the field, Container Atlas explains the historical development of container use in architecture, documents plans, describes associated costs, and suggests concrete solutions for common problems. The book also introduces the various types of containers currently in use today, from standard shipping models to modular pieces made to order out of various materials or with customized cutouts. Container Atlas is a practical and inspirational reference for architects, planners, and cultural activists as well as event and marketing managers, to guide them in deciding what types of containers are best suited to their upcoming projects.

With years of theoretical and practical experience in the fields of container architecture and modular building, architect and professor Han Slawik and his team have established themselves as international experts in these fields.

Container Atlas: A Practical Guide to Container Architecture
H. Slawik, J. Bergmann, M. Buchmeier and S. Tinney
Gestalten / Hardback / 256 pages / April 2010 / Code 71794 / ISBN: 978 3 89955 2 867

Website:www.ribabookshops.com/

The first guide to the terminology of sustainable design. Written by an internationally renowned expert in the field, this illustrated dictionary provides over 1500 definitions and explanations of ecodesign terms.
March 2010 | Code 68919 | Routledge | 294 pages | Hardback | £40.00
Click here to browse through the RIBA Bookshops website.

Can a book be an architectural form? According to the Architectural Association School (AA) in Bloomsbury they can. The AA’s current exhibition does just that, displaying books produced by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and its many collaborators in order to reveal their key role as a revolutionary architectural form.

Curated and edited by AA director Brett Steele and AA art director Zak Kyes in collaboration with the OMA Archive Collection, Book Machine offers a hitherto unseen retrospective not only of a key architectural office of our time, but of architectural culture itself, which has long been defined by and circulated through books and the printed page – a medium that today is undergoing profound, even revolutionary, changes.

The centre piece of the show is a specially-made 40,000-page book, binding together hundreds of OMA’s pamphlets and books made over 35 years of architectural thought, work and provocation.

Adjacent to this show, the AA’s bar will display a large selection of one-off books made by AA students in recent years as part of their studies. Spring 2010 at the AA presents a season of books and aims to demonstrate the enduring importance of books as, and not only in, the architecture of our time.

OMA Book Machine: The Books of OMA runs until 29 May 2010 at AA Gallery, 36 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3ES.

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