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COMMUNICATE: INDEPENDANT BRITISH GRAPHIC DESIGN SINCE THE SIXTIES, by Rick Poyner (ed.)
Over the last several decades, pop culture has become a large influence in British graphic design, and especially with independent design studios. Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties provides a unique selection of work from more than 80 designers influenced by youth culture, pop music, and new wave from the 1960s to now.

With more than 350 full-color images, Communicate includes a bit of everything from pop culture design—record album covers from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin to The Chemical Brothers, psychedelic rock posters, political protest posters, typeface projects and signage, and book, magazine, and film design.

The book (as well as an exhibition of the same name at the Barbican Art Gallery in London) focuses on work from independent studios rather than big-name firms because, as Poyner explains in his introduction, “Designers featured in Communicate wanted to stay independent because they had an independent point of view. It was important to them to take on projects to which they could bring a strong sense of commitment and personal involvement.”

Rather than always focusing on the clients’ expectations, tastes, and wallet, these designers allowed themselves to push against constraints rather than simply design to suit them. The result of focusing on this genre of designers rather than on big name, big budget firms is a collection of beautiful, intelligent works accompanied by insightful interviews with designers and thoughtful essays on design culture.
$39.95, softcover, 256 pages, Yale University Press

EURO DECO: GRAPHIC DESIGN BETWEEN THE WARS, by Steven Heller and Louise Fili
The ambitious design duo is at it again—Steven Heller and Louise Fili have paired up their professional knowledge to produce a book on graphic design in Europe between World Wars I and II. Euro Deco is a compilation of samples of Art Deco graphics taken from posters, packaging, magazines, advertisements, menus, and more, from France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Heller and Fili compiled Euro Deco from a now out-of-print Chronicle Books series, “Deco Graphic Design,” consisting of nine books, of which they chose six to cover—French Modern, Italian Art Deco, German Modern, British Modern, Dutch Modern, and Spanish Art Deco. “Art Deco may have gone out of fashion, but it’s not out of style,” begins Heller’s foreword.

Regarding his outlook on the modern spirit captured in the design of the time period covered in this book, Heller explains, “Arguably type was the more overt graphic element—even more so than illustration—that defined the Deco aesthetic. Without emblematic typefaces Deco would not have had half its impact.”

Heller makes a good case for the accomplishments of European Art Deco fonts. “Today some of these typefaces are used in graphic design that evoke a nostalgic response while some have passed the test of time and remain current because they are viable and durable,” he argues. “Moreover, many of the posters, packages, displays, and magazine and book covers reproduced in this book are exemplary in any period. Take away the stylization and the basic design structures are strong. But the goal of Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars is not only to preserve the treasures but to unearth the forgotten artifacts that comprise the critical mass of Art Deco graphics that dominated the print design milieu for almost two decades.”

From French soap packaging to Italian Fascist propaganda to German Notgeld notes (emergency paper money used for goods or services) to Spanish book covers to Dutch calendars to British exposition posters, this book is bound to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for typographers, designers, and collectors alike.
$35, hardcover, 500 pages, Chronicle Books

FRESH DIALOGUE FIVE: NEW VOICES IN GRAPHIC DESIGN, by Nicola Bednarek (ed.)
“Fresh air, fresh fish, fresh brewed, fresh flowers, fresh toast, freshly squeezed, and of course … Fresh Dialogue.” So begins this fifth edition of AIGA New York’s annual panel discussion with fresh talents in the design community. The participants in this edition (from last year’s dialogue) include five designers from the completely diverse worlds of fashion, publishing, web, advertising, and art.

“This year we chose our participants from a wide range of disciplines and experience, looking for designers who, no matter how experienced they are or what they specialize in, are producing work that is current and powerful, are constantly engaged with the culture at large, and are always searching for fresh solutions,” explains the foreword of Chris Dixon and John Fulbrook III, Fresh Dialogue Chairs.

The panelists included in Fresh Dialogue Five were Alice Chung and Karen Hsu, founders of Omnivore; Agnieszka Gasparska, founder of design studio Kiss Me I’m Polish; Alan Dye, design director for Kate Spade and Jack Spade, previously design director/partner at Ogilvy & Mather’s BIG; and Rodrigo Corral, book jacket designer for Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) and founder of Rodrigo Corral Design Inc.

A written reenactment of the dialogue between moderator Chip Kidd and the participants, the book takes readers on a past/present/ future career trajectory with each panelist, presenting colorful imagery of these up-and-coming designers’ works.
$24.95, softcover, 136 pages, Princeton Architectural Press

U&LC: INFLUENCING DESIGN & TYPOGRAPHY, by John D. Berry (ed.)
Nearly 100 quarterly issues of U&lc (Upper & lower case), a publication with the purpose of selling and supporting ITC typefaces, were published in its life span from 1973 to 1999. The editor of this celebration of U&lc’s history, John D. Berry, the magazine’s former editor, begins the book with four articles on U&lc contributed by himself and three other noteworthy people: Joyce Rutter Kaye, managing editor of U&lc for six years; Rhonda Rubenstein, who designed three issues of the publication; and Steven Heller, who wrote many articles for U&lc over the years.

After these sagacious articles is “A U&lc Perspective”—150 pages of reproduced spreads of selected articles, beginning with the very first issue and ending with the last. Short biographical notes on the designers responsible for the publications, a list of the contents of each issue, as well as a list of the designer and editor of each issue are included in the back. The genius in U&lc lies in the fact that it is not simply a book about the magazine, but actual reproductions of interesting and still-useful articles. “One can only speculate on whether or not U&lc lived out its full life expectancy,” writes Heller. “But ... now it is, perhaps as Lubalin [U&lc founding designer/editor] would have wanted, a document for the ages—as long as the brittle newsprint does not turn to dust.”

As Berry concludes in his introduction, in which he not only talks about the publication’s long history and success but also expounds on his tenure as its final editor, “This book presents a representative sampling of U&lc's pages through 27 years, but the real monument to U&lc's endurance is those yellowing stacks of old issues so carefully preserved in so many designers’ basements and attics and archives.” If your old issues are indeed getting yellowed and fragile with age, this book not only compiles them for you, it gives a new outlook on an old favorite.
$55, hardcover (casebound), 192 pages, Mark Batty Publisher