27.12.05
Our best designer book of the year

It’s that time of the year when the papers are full of their books of the year so here’s our best ‘designer’ book of the year: Chip Kidd Book One (Alfred Knopf). A fantastic trawl through virtually every cover he’s ever done. At first the chaotic layout, first person writing style and regular love letters from favoured clients seem really cheesy but you get drawn into it (and of course the designs are phenomenal). Five stars from us and very highly recommended. Try and get it in hardback for its bizarre split cover.

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20.12.05
From dogma to direct debits - the fall of 8vo

At least one of the johnson banks team was around to remember the advent of 8vo (or octavo if you’re flummoxed by the abbreviation) and the impact it had on eighties graphics.

This was a time when the more established British design groups seemed umbilically attached to their centred layouts and woodcuts, and would almost proudly pronounce to new designers that ‘they hadn’t used Helvetica for years’ because they could still remember when the Swiss style had ruled 70s corporate design. Little wonder that 8vo were initially derided. Of course the generation graduating in the 80s immediately adopted them as their new heroes and it wasn’t long before Helvetica Black was merrily subsumed into the armoury of tricks deployed by a new wave of ‘aesthetic modernists’, drawn to grids and sans serif as a look rather than a credo.

So the little tome produced by Lars Müller on the group comes at a time when 8vo has dissolved and scattered to other countries, or drifted into teaching. Incidentally one of the group now teaches at London’s LCC (which sponsored the publication and supplied a postscript, which strikes us a bit fishy, but hey what do we know).

8vo’s tale is a galling one. In a decade they moved from being at the vanguard of a typographic revival and denouncing the designers of the day on late night TV to designing automatic bill statements. It’s been said of this change that it shows that a real designer can do anything, perhaps that’s true. But to fall that far and that fast strikes us as salutory: for a designer to have a recognisable style they’d better be prepared to re-invent themselves every decade, otherwise dusty chapters of the history books beckon.

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