It seems somewhat silly to publish a book filled with pictures of nothing but trademarks; after all, how useful can a book be that deliberately shows pictures of the things that already permeate everyday life? There are trademarks on the clothes I wear, on my coffee cup, and on nearly every product I see on store shelves. One would be hard-pressed to find a more ubiquitous subject matter.

You wouldn’t be wrong to ask such questions, however, Marks of Excellence is much more than a catalog of brand logos. Revised and expanded for its latest edition, the book is filled with over 1,000 color illustrations, each one carefully selected to be an object lesson on some aspect of trademarks the purpose they serve. Used as a launching pad, this collection of trademarks is able to draw connections and bring insight to almost every aspect of their use. Read more…

Stripes: Design Between the Lines
By Linda O’Keefe
The Monacelli Press, 224 pages, $50.00
Image courtesy of The Monacelli Press

Stripes, with their smooth and clean flow, may be the most straightforward of all decorative markings. Yet, for all their simplicity, stripes continuously create drama, both aesthetically and in societal terms.

Dramatically illustrated with photographs of the fashion, art, architecture, and furnishings that stripes have adorned over the centuries, Linda O’Keefe’s book tells a story that began thousands of years ago in ancient caves. The social context of stripes can be found as far back as biblical times when Matthew speaks of the privileged children of great men who “oft had their garments striped with divers colors.” Since then the markings have never ceased to cause controversy.

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The Book of Books: 500 Years of Graphic Innovation
Edited by Mathieu Lommen
Thames & Hudson, 464 pages, $65.00
Image courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Matthieu Lommen, curator at the Special Collections department of the Amsterdam University Library has compiled an excellent collection of books, illustrating more than 500 years of Western book design. Starting with Nicolas Jenson’s 1471 edition of Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae Linguae Latinae the collection ends with Irma Boom’s 2010 James, Jennifer, Georgina are the Butlers—-a 1,198-page sculptural book that traces the history of one family.

The Book of Books is a massive survey, weighing in at 6½ pounds, and is rich with examples. Short essays are devoted to such topics as the invention and spread of printing, nineteenth-century graphic techniques, the avant-garde and New Typography, and design in the Postmodern era. References to the great printers and engravers of the past—Aldus Manutius, Albert Durer, and Christoffel Plantin—are all included as well as to the designers of modern times (with shout outs to avant-guardians like El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, and Stefan Sagmeister).

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I’ll admit I was a little skeptical when I cracked open Taras Grescoe’s latest book Straphanger, which is both paean to public transportation and an evisceration of car culture. Living happily car-free in New York, I feared I might be the choir to the Montrealer’s preaching. But while the book—part history, part travelogue, and part manifesto—might not seem terribly radical to city-dwellers, Grescoe makes the argument for mass transit in a way you might not have heard before.

In the course of writing Straphanger, Grescoe visited a dozen cities across the world and spent considerable time getting to know their transit systems, figuring out how and why they work (or don’t). After a short prologue in Shanghai, Grescoe starts his global commute in New York, where the subway system maintains a tetchy coexistence with street-level planning that’s historically favored cars over pedestrians. Subsequent cities each provide a slightly different perspective on transportation: Phoenix gives us a primer on the difficulties of low-density sprawl; Copenhagen is a model of bike-friendly infrastructure; Bogotá’s rapid bus system proves how quickly a mass transit network can be rolled out from scratch.

Despite being one of the most crowded transit systems in the world, Moscow’s Metro is endowed with spacious, luxuriously appointed stations. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

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To get one large point out of the way: In the new book, The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc, several contributors rapidly acknowledge the oxymoron of the title as well as the practice of owning a car in the former Soviet Empire. The private automobile, that avatar of western individualism, is difficult to square with collectivist notions. And once its owners were at the wheel, these socialist automobiles were often difficult to reconcile with notions of mechanical reliability. More than one contemporary joke appears in the text; the introduction, for instance offers,  “Why does a Trabant have a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm when pushing it.” All that aside, the collection of essays edited by Lewis Siegelbaum, is a fascinating look at automobile use, production, and urban planning behind the Iron Curtain. It reveals a system that, if far from socialist or egalitarian in origin, created a culture of automobile use distinct from the western world.

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Integral Sustainable Design, [amazon.com] reconciles divergent knowledge arenas and priorities while establishing integral sustainable design as a unique practice, ideal for this time of environmental and communitarian crisis. It’s author, Mark DeKay, prods the profession and asks, what design challenges lie beyond whole systems design? And how can we shift our focus from ‘doing’ design to ‘being’ design? DeKay, a professor of architecture and director of Graduate Studies, College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, has crafted an accessible introduction to the fascinating emerging field of integral studies as applied to the practice of architecture.

What is Integral Theory and why might it be useful to designers? Integral Theory is a powerful critical approach, actually considered a meta-theory due to its breadth, its applicability to interdisciplinary studies, its integration of the truth claims of the arts, sciences, and humanities as well as its integration of the perennial philosophy across Eastern and Western, sacred and secular views. Ken Wilber, the American writer, scholar and framer of Integral Theory, first began writing in the early 1970’s in his area of specialization, developmental psychology, and its intersections with spirituality and the spectrum of consciousness described throughout history. Wilber has published over 25 books. His influential ideas have found application across a range of disciplines, spawning the young but expanding global interdisciplinary movement in scholarly and practical applications of his ideas now referred to as integral studies, inclusive of but not limited to the research and writings of Wilber himself.

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