Stichting Dutch Heights/Grafische Cultuurstichting
Contributions by: Bas Heijne/Gary Schwartz/K.Schippers/Adriaan van Dis
Amsterdam/Heemstede 2010
Printed paper-covered boards 576 pages
Richly illustrated in colour
Design: Irma Boom Office
Text in English
Expected publication date; March 10 2010
Price: € 39.50
The Netherlands has a large and varied list of (yearly) prizes in the fields of art, architecture, design, film, photography, literature, fashion, music, and theater. This new, yearly publication, is meant to present all of these prizes together in a single volume, presenting the recipiants and their award-winning work; and, it discusses the various prizes' origins, standards, the jurys and their rulings. It also contains essays by leading Dutch publicists about cultural prizes and their influences.
The publication will be supported by the Dutch graphic industry and in that sense it is a replacement for the now defunked "Grafische Nederland'. It will be published on a yearly bases.
The book has been designed by award-winning book designer Irma Boom.
There is also a Dutch language edition.
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Swip Stolk/Willem Ellenbroek
Amsterdam 2009
Printed paper-covered boards 528 pages
1500 Illustrations in black & white
Including a separate sheet of (postal) stamps
7 different paper sorts
Design: Swip Stolk
Text in English
Price: € 39.50
Swip Stolk holds a rather unique place in the graphic design world of the Netherlands. In the 50 years that he has been a designer he has always gone his own way, never compromising himself and never following the trends of the day. He has preserved everything from those fifty year, right down to the smallest sketch. "I never throw anything away". His archive is a treasure chest, as this book demonstrates. It is a self-made, extravagant portrait of the artist and his work.
There is also a Dutch edition.
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Gladys Fabre/Doris Wintgens Hötte (Editors)
Tate Publishing London 2009
Sewn paperback 264 pages
Illustrated in colour & bl/w
Design: Fernando Gutiérrez
Text in English
Price: € 33.95
Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) is perhaps best known as a prime mover in 'De Stijl', the Dutch artistic movement that demanded an elemental, abstract vocabulary in both painting and architecture.
This study, accompanying a major touring exhibition, reveals for the first time the true extent of his involvement with Dada and Constructivist artists' groups spread across the whole of Europe,as far as Russia and beyond, and the breadth of his creative practice in fields as diverse as film, typography, graphic design and music.
A man of multiple talents and identities, he was inspired by the catastrophe of the First World War to attempt nothing less than the reshaping of culture in its entirety and the construction of a new world order.
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François Rappo (Editor)
ECAL University of Art & Design
Lausanne Switzerland 2009
Sewn paperback 180 pages
Printed in black & red
Design: David Keshavjee/Julien Tavelli
Text in English & French
Price: € 29.50
This publication continues the ECAL design series initiated with "ECAL Graphic Design" and "ECAL Typography." The project began with a simple question: is there such thing as a computer program capable of taking over the routine tasks of letter design? This issue, both artistic and digital, led the professors and the students of the Masters in Art Direction of the ECAL to imagine exchanges back and forth between digital type specifications and the actual shape of letters. They went into more general questions about the groups of shapes that make up our letters—stems, curves, and serifs—asking themselves how they could possibly simplify and further amalgamate these groups of shapes that monopolize the energy of schoolchildren, illustrators, and type designers alike. Calligraphy and hand-drawn letters comprise series of strokes and curves; mechanical typography does too, through the engraving process of punches and counter-punches. Digital typography, however, dematerialises this operation, leaving the choice of formal references open-ended. Does that mean novel forms of design could evolve through manipulating fonts' algorithmic data? Several small scripting programs were developed and tested by the students during a series of workshops. From a set of typography experiments based on these simple scripts, David Keshavjee and Julien Tavelli designed a text typeface that is featured in this book and displays the characteristics of the tool that generated it. As an extension to this concept, mobile wooden characters were made as a materialization of a graphic application arising from scripting techniques; this enabled play with typographic equipment, hand setting, spaces, and printing. The intention of building project-specific, sometimes unstable tools was part of a quest for unity within a graphic project the initial design and production stages of which were characterized by the same approach: extending the scope of the typographic game.
With contributions by Peter Bilak, Dimitri Bruni, Pierre Keller, David Keshavjee & Julien Tavelli, Jürg Lehni, François Rappo, & Erik Spiekermann.
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Kelly Shannon/Marcel Smets
NAi Publishers Rotterdam 2010
Printed paper-covered boards 272 pages
Illustrations in colour & bl/w
Design: Piet Gerards Ontwerpers
Text in English
Price: € 49.50
The design of infrastructural networks is among today’s most complex and most important design tasks. In recent times much attention has been paid to the new ‘urbanized’ landscape that has sprung up around infrastructural networks. Around the globe the importance of infrastructure as the motor of economic development is rising because of increasing mobility and need to make central locations accessible. Infrastructure is an important instrument for the design of public space and landscapes: areas around airport and railway stations, motorway systems and sprawling suburbs, traffic routes to shopping malls, access to industrial areas in the periphery and so on.
This book investigates how the design of infrastructure actively influences the organization of the inhabited landscape. Works of infrastructure are analyzed as footprints of civilization, as physical presence, as transformers of perception, and as new vessels of collective life. The authors identify these characteristics, together with the conditions that influence them, and suggest a typology of design attitudes as revealing in recent practice around the world.
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