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The Design Book: New Edition by Phaidon Editors
, 6 Aug 2021
I LIKE
> Portable and compact coffee-table sort of book.
> Elegant cover and inner cover design.
> Pleasurable paper stock.
> Informative without being a bore. Easy to read.
> Mix of design pieces (think Aalto, anything produced by Alessi or Jansen) and invented/patented pieces that are part of our daily lives (zip, Dixon pencil, safety pin, metal dustbin, cylinder lock, door handle, corkscrew, etc.).
> Very good photos overall. Many of them are vintage images of the designers or of the adds used to sell the products.
> Excellent binding. You can comfortably open the book and read both pages without fearing that they will come out.
> Index of products at the end.
> Informative without being a bore. Easy to read.
> Mix of design pieces (think Aalto, anything produced by Alessi or Jansen) and invented/patented pieces that are part of our daily lives (zip, Dixon pencil, safety pin, metal dustbin, cylinder lock, door handle, corkscrew, etc.).
> Very good photos overall. Many of them are vintage images of the designers or of the adds used to sell the products.
> Excellent binding. You can comfortably open the book and read both pages without fearing that they will come out.
> Index of products at the end.
DOWNSIDES
> The paper is too thin and a bit transparent-ish.
> No fabric page marker included in the binding, something that is common in similar design books by Taschen.
> The lettering is very small and I need a magnifying glass to read the text.
> The body of the text is not justified, something that always annoys me.
> The book has no introduction with the criteria used for the selection of the pieces included in the book, period covered or any other relevant information on the matter.
> The selection lacks cultural diversity, as there is a constant rotation of specific designers and areas of the world. I would have liked a bit of more open-minded, to call it something, because it is difficult to understand why there isn't any South-East Asian, African, or South American designer in the book, and why France and Spain and so under-represented. Because, you aren't going to tell me that there designers from those parts of the world haven't designed anything we use or didn't contribute to the history of design at all.
> The paper is too thin and a bit transparent-ish.
> No fabric page marker included in the binding, something that is common in similar design books by Taschen.
> The lettering is very small and I need a magnifying glass to read the text.
> The body of the text is not justified, something that always annoys me.
> The book has no introduction with the criteria used for the selection of the pieces included in the book, period covered or any other relevant information on the matter.
> The selection lacks cultural diversity, as there is a constant rotation of specific designers and areas of the world. I would have liked a bit of more open-minded, to call it something, because it is difficult to understand why there isn't any South-East Asian, African, or South American designer in the book, and why France and Spain and so under-represented. Because, you aren't going to tell me that there designers from those parts of the world haven't designed anything we use or didn't contribute to the history of design at all.
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