The stroke is the most concise and powerful statement of Gerrit Noordzij's theory of writing. First published in Dutch in 1985, it appears here for the first time in English. The book puts forward a genuine theory of all writing, done with any kind of generating tool. Noordzij starts with fundamentals - the space within and between letters - and proceeds in stages towards a full account of how the strokes of writing can be formed, and an analysis of the qualities of letters. Along the way, there are reflections on history and culture, and remarks on method. Noordzij's theory serves to repair the split that grew up, with the invention of printing, between written and typographic letters. He shows us the underlying written' quality of all letters, with whatever technology they have been formed. Just by virtue of its strong theory, The stroke has practical consequences that transcend any simple 'how to do it' approach.

The stroke theory of writing

“Systematic book design?” was written for a lecture Jost Hochuli gave for the first time in Munich in 2007, and then at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2011 on the initiative of F7. The text has been first published in Back Cover magazine in 2011. John Morgan’s foreword was especially written for the present edition.
Jost Hochuli’s text was translated from German by Charles Whitehouse.

Does designing a book follow a logical and well-thought-out process? Swiss graphic designer and typographer Jost Hochuli studies the crucial role played by instinct throughout the various stages of planning a book, from selecting a typeface and its size to determining the layout of the blocks of text.

Éditions B42

Systematic book design?

Designing Books provides practical guidelines for book design: page proportions, typefaces, paper choices, bindings, and book jackets. Numerous drawings and reproductions of book pages accompany the text. Also included is an overview of book design and the work of Swiss typographer, Jost Hochuli.

Designing books practice and theory

English translation of a famous 1972 debate between Dutch graphic designers Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn, a public clash of subjectivity versus objectivity at Amsterdam’s Museum Fodor that helped set the stage for bold philosophical showdowns to come in design culture.   Held in response to an exhibition of Van Toorn’s work at Stedelijk Museum, including student posters protesting the Vietnam War ―in an era of youth culture and increasing resistance to authority, capitalism, and the power of media ― the stakes were aesthetic, ethical, and politically charged. 

The Debate

Graphic-design group, art house, music makers, typographic sculptors - no phrase can accurately characterize the work of Tomato, the London-based design collective. This text encompasses Tomato's output in its first five years. Each spread reflects the personal journeys and designs that form the graphic and commercial work of Tomato. In part an eclectic mixture of artistic concepts and working ideas which offer a glimpse into the creative processes that inform the projects, this text's formulation is unified by a single, mutating typographic text line around which the team's individual contributions revolve.

Process;

Max Bill studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich from 1924 until 1927. He visited Paris in 1925 and was inspired by the work of Le Corbusier, Josef Hoffmann and Friedrich Kiesler. After attending a lecture by Le Corbusier in Zurich he decided to study architecture. He studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, from 1927 until 1929. Then moved to Zurich and worked in typography, graphic design, painting, sculpture and architecture. He was also a teacher at  Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, a guest lecturer at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt and worked at  Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm.

Max Bill

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

TV Series Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing

Otl Aicher's writings are explorations of the world, a substantive part of his work. In moving through the history of thought and design, building and construction, he assures us of the possibilities of arranging existence in a humane fashion. As ever he is concerned with the question of the conditions needed to produce a civilized culture. These conditions have to be fought for against apparent factual or material constraints and spiritual and intellectual substitutes on offer.


The World As Design

The Foundation Program at the School of Design in Basel, Swit zerland is a fundamental education in art and design. It offers a number of interrelated, equally important courses. Subjects include exercises in form, aesthetics, and concepts, all of which are designed to promote optical and tactical sensitivity, formal perception, manual dexterity, and a clear understanding of creative processes and to clarity the students individual talents. The program enables them to choose future professional training in graphic design, photography, typography, display design, goldsmithery, pottery, fine art, sculpture, and other related fields.

Basic Principles of Design

A collection of 40 essays about art, design and visual communications by leading design critic Rick Poynor.

Why Graphic Culture Matters

Laszlo Moholy-Nagyb was a major innovator of the avant-garde and one of the most important theoreticians of the 1920s.

Vision in Motion

Complete review of Herbert Bayer works from visual communications, to architecture and painting.

visual communication architecture painting

Although typography has always reflected the cultural pattern of its period, today's typefaces and typographic design are a reflection of the past, not of contemporary society.

De Buitenkant

Wim Crouwel Gerrit Noordzij prize

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was a private museum that opened in Kiyosato, Yamanashi Prefecture in 1990 and closed in 2014.

This book, focusing exclusively on the museum’s “Ephemera” collection, is the first volume of a project to assemble the materials of the Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art, which have never been compiled until now, and to publish archival books.

Edition Telescope

Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art: Archive 1 Ephemera

Paying tribute to an artistic partnership of more than 30 years, this richly illustrated book explores Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s acclaimed and influential body of work, known for its sly humor and profound meditations on the everyday. 

The Way Things Go

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better

Since the 1970s Wolfgang Weingart has exerted a decisive influence on the international development of typography. In the late 1960s he instilled creativity and a desire for experimentation into the ossified Swiss typographical industry and reflected this renewal in his own work. 

His works at MoMA

My Way to Typography

Comprehensive collection of 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.

A Designer's Art gives unique insight into Rand's design process and theory.

Paul Rand

A Designer's Art

She devoted her life to her craft and photographed continuously and passionately for over 70 years. Her images of the body explore the human form in great detail: eyes, ears, heads, hands, breasts, feet.

Imogen Cunningham: On the Body

Imogen Cunningham: Flora presents a stunning selection of Cunningham's botanical images dating from 1913 through the 1970s, with an emphasis on work from the 1920s and 1930s. More than half the images have never been published. 

Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham: Flora

"Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like  Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don't claim to be setting new standards for seeing."

On Photography

Brought to you by GraphicDesign&,
Page 1: Great Expectations is an unusual
typographic experiment designed to
explore the relationship between graphic
design, typography and the reading of
a printed page.

GraphicDesign&

Page 1: Great Expectations

"Once we start look at life in this creative way, we become far freer and more fluid, in our quest for inspiring relations with our environment. This is, in fact, what artists do. They do not utilise their objects, but initiate a conversation with the environment. Listening to what it has to offer, as well as offering something of themselves to the environment, which it still lacks. This is how the art grows. 

The principle has more common with dialogue and communication that with monologue and utilisation"

Valiz

Creative Theories of (Just About) Everything

Maybe this is the happiest house on earth.

The Private World of Pablo Picasso

When the eyes and years are prevented from perceiving meaningful order, they can only react to the brutal signals of immediate satisfaction

Film as Art

Copywriting

"I don't feel comfortable talking about pleasure; I find it easier to talk about desire. Since I started composing perfumes I've learned, I've invented 'catchphrase-smells', like the first sentence, the first notes of a piece of music, the initial images that are reworked at length to capture a reader's, a listener's, a spectator's attention."

Book cover design by Pentagram

The Diary of a Nose

Art and Visual Perception

The mind's eye. Writings on Photography and Photographers

"Studio Culture (original edition of 2009) provides a unique glimpse into the inner workings of 28 leading graphic design studios. In a series of penetrating interviews, the secret life of the studio is revealed, and the mechanics of building and maintaining a vibrant studio culture are laid bare with disarming frankness."

Unit Editions

Typeface Optimo Hermes

Post Poetics bookstore

Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio

Interviews and Conversations 1951-1998

In Praise of Shadows

Atmospheres

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.
This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water."

Alice's Book Shelf