Niggli Verlag

Insightful texts on book design that explore the visual, tactile, and cultural aspects of books through the perspective of graphic designers Fifty readings on book design, authored by Siri Lee Lindskrog and Amanda-Li Kollberg of Formal Settings, unfold across the pages of this volume. Drawn from a curated selection of titles in the private collection of the Hopscotch Reading Room – a conceptual bookshop and event space in Berlin – each text focuses on a single book, examining its visual and tactile qualities, from materials and layout to binding and typography. “Our aim is to understand the role and potential of books through a design lens, mapping what they communicate through their physical form.” The authors guide readers through the intricacies of book design, showing how form can become message – how a book can serve as a vessel, a statement, and an object of beauty in its own right. They explore and examine each book as a design object, situating it within the cultural movements, political climates, and economic conditions in which it was produced. This publication reveals how book design can foster shared languages and cultures, create space for the exchange and exploration of ideas, and underscore the social and cultural dimensions of design itself. With an afterword by designer, author, and teacher Prem Krishnamurthy, providing further context and insight into the project.

An exploration of the shift towards work environments that foster creativity, well-being and meaningful growth – reimagining the future of work as a place where people really want to be. Although more and more tasks are being taken over by machines and artificial intelligence, humans remain the central element to the working world. For knowledge workers in particular, the choice of workplace will increasingly depend on where they can best utilize their skills, find meaning in their work, and experience a positive working environment. Where Future Grows explores this transformation of work and examines how future workplaces should be designed. An environment that considers both functional and aesthetic aspects will become increasingly important. The authors present a vision of a working world where the boundary between life and work dissolves, allowing human potential to be fully realized. Through detailed analyses of future work environments and a series of interviews, best-practice examples illustrate how workplaces should be designed to foster both professional and personal growth.

To Make Better Use of Typography Typography is an essential part of visual communication design. The rapid changes brought about by digitalization also have a major impact on the type design process. Users need a solid knowledge base in order to deal with the seemingly unmanageable abundance of exciting and new fonts and to use them sensibly. A precise and inspiring guide for all those who want to understand and use typography in a focused and effective way, this volume provides both creative inspiration and a practical understanding. This is made possible in particular by a clear structural concept for classification into categories and subcategories, followed by a detailed look at the features. The authors present a selection of more than one hundred relevant typefaces, supplemented by historical background, user-relevant information and explanations of their special formal characteristics to make it easier to recognize the underlying formal principles.

A comprehensive and highly visual overview, from the cultural and theoretical background to the amazing variety and everything one needs to know about the creative potential of emojis and how graphic designers can capitalize on this exciting communication trend. A means of expression for billions of people, emojis have established their function in our everyday lives. Increasingly complex in quality and quantity, these written language companions have long since transcended the realm of written communication to become a pop culture phenomenon of their own. This handbook is a manual and source of inspiration for anyone seeking to understand and use the full potential of emojis in visual communication. It combines cultural, historical, and theoretical backgrounds with practical application examples. Selected works from recent years demonstrate the formal diversity of emojis and offer inspiration for one’s own work. Specific cases are used to show how emojis can be used in very different ways in the implementation of design tasks and creative projects to thus become part of visual identities.

Reflections and practical action for the rapidly evolving discipline of visual communication. Communication design is undergoing radical changes: an overabundant flood of information, fake news, bots, AI, social media, crude graphic tools on the Internet as well as the speed of processes and increasing pressure to be efficient, coupled with increased competition in the design sector and sometimes precarious working conditions. All of these factors put creatives in the field under pressure, leaving them little time to reflect on their own work. This handbook responds to the current situation by shedding new light on the societal relevance of the discipline in the context of professional practice. The authors use their extensive expertise, practical work examples, and actionable suggestions to identify what really matters in visual communication. They describe the far-reaching interconnectedness of design with a wide range of issues and deal intensively with the current challenges. The overarching leitmotif is that communication design is always the result of the attitude of its protagonists – this compendium makes clear how their actions influence communication, what values are conveyed, and what our visual world looks like as a result.

This monograph shows how the oloid, a timelessly beautiful geometric body, serves today more than ever as a source of inspiration and functional component in the visual arts and design, in technology and research, in architecture, philosophy, and music. In 1929, the sculptor, inventor and researcher Paul Schatz (1898-1971) discovered the geometric form of the oloid. Schatz' lifework was characterized by this fundamentally new body, which emerged from movement, for which he sought and found new and pioneering applications for a number of decades. This monograph, rich in images and generally understandable, shows how today, more than ever, the timelessly beautiful oloid serves as a source of inspiration and a functional element. This is true for the fine arts and design, in technology and research, in architecture, philosophy or music. Close aesthetic references to the contemporaneous sculptures of Naum Gabo, Constantin Brancusi, or Henry Moore are just as surprising as current homages to Paul Schatz by artists such as Ólafur Eliasson. As simple as it is complex, at the same time elegant and powerful, the oloid proves to be a universal body that has not yet revealed all its secrets and potential.

An indispensable handbook about monospaced typefaces with the relevant cultural-historical background, a variety of convincing applications and extensive typeface collection accompanied by all needed facts and information. Monospaced fonts originate from the typewriter and are characterized by the peculiarity that all letters, digits and characters have the same width. Mono is the new Black discusses the function and aesthetics of this unique kind of typeface and deals with its cult status in the (mainly young) design scene. The aim of the handbook is to inform and inspire typographers, typeface developers, designers, as well as readers interested in culture in general with facts, analyses, expert positions, practical examples, and a comprehensive font collection. In a cultural-historical outline, the author first presents the historical aspects of this typeface and shows how closely intertwined type, technical progress, and social development are. In the middle section, he presents a selection of examples of the work of globally active designers and agencies with a focus on the many possible applications. The final section is a script compendium that provides a clear overview of 175 monospaced fonts and shows the changes that these distinctive monospaced fonts have undergone, from machine type to entirely digitally developed coding fonts.

Drawing is not a myth, but a tool, a means of gaining knowledge and the basis for illustrative and artistic pictorial expressions How pictures can be used to tell a story, how are they made, and how the head and the hand collaborate in the creative process? Just as each image is unique, so are the individual intentions of the artists. The technical craftsmanship of HOW is as much a decisive criterion for the quality of an image as its contextual WHAT. In addition to all depiction methods, rules of design, and phenomena of perception, a number of additional factors are important in making convincingly narrated images. This book invites readers to question the world with alert eyes, to discard conventions and to open up to other ways of thinking and new ways of seeing and approaching things: to dare to be playful and ready for any kind of experiment, to ultimately throw all rules overboard in order to find their very own artistic individuality. The author's approach is not so much a step-by-step instruction with template-like schemes, instead it focuses on the intrinsic logic of things, their connections and relations, and the link between presentation and design.

Although Arabic is the third-most widely used script in the world, there is a lack of sound typographic literature. This publication is a multi-disciplinary reference work that combines the latest academic research with applied typography. The focus on elements that pertain specifically to Arabic typography prevents overlapping with the comprehensive literature on Latin script typography, making the book relevant and accessible to the widest possible audience. The first part provides an in-depth synthesis on the typographic history and development of the Arabic script, bringing together a cohort of young scholars who are breaking new grounds in pursuing research excellence. In the more extensive second part, these historical foundations are complemented by a concise guide to Arabic typography through the lens of a design practitioner. Inspired by Jost Hochuli's standard work "Detail in Typography", the author vividly addresses all relevant micro-typographic parameters.

Cyrillic is a script used in numerous primarily eastern and southern Slavic languages in Europe and Asia. "Cyrillize it!" is an introductory work for graphic designers who are not native to the Cyrillic script, and cannot read Cyrillic-based languages. The book offers a method of dealing meaningfully and successfully with writing systems other than your own. The approach is based on constantly drawing parallels between Latin and Cyrillic, thus making a foreign script more familiar to non-native users. The author reflects about the relevance of Cyrillic in the modern world, looks at the history and currrent design trends, provides an overview of the typographic rules, and provides examples of Cyrillic graphic design works. With a playful and esthetically appealing design, the publication is also of interest to non-designers who are generally curious about the topic of Cyrillic script and related cultures.

From the analysis of the formal components of objects, via an overview of the possibilities of developing and optimizing the creative process, to the development of one's own evaluation catalog. What shapes exist? What form-giving operations are possible? What are the evaluation standards for existing objects and those to be developed? These three fundamental questions, which every architect, designer, and artist asks, again and again, are addressed, systematically explained, and answered in three sections in this volume. The publication also provides readers with a set of basic tools that enables them to communicate better when discussing and explaining their own work with other creative people and other professionals. The first part is a comprehensive compilation that identifies and describes all forms within objects. The middle section offers a qualitative overview of the possibilities with which form elements, forms, or objects can be developed and optimized. In the third section, the methodology for the development of an own evaluation system is presented. The objective of this work is to offer an orientation on the basics of design, combining the aspects of form, craft, content, and method into a holistic understanding of design.

Santiago Calatrava is among the most important and influential architects of our times. His candid architecture is polarizing yet unmistakable. The trademark of the Spanish architect are sculptural bridge designs that gained international acclaim as a symbiosis of elegant shape vocabulary and engi - neering master feats and that shape the cityscapes in locations such as Jerusa - lem, Venice, and Dallas. This book is a special homage to his work: Santiago Calatrava in person talks about the visions on artistic-archi - tectural philosophies behind his unpar - alleled bridge designs. He also contrib - utes many descriptions of implemented and unimplemented projects, which, together with first drafts, water color paintings, as well as high-quality pho - tographs and renderings, document the selected projects.

Airports are places with multi-layered identities that millions of people pass through and where cultures meet: On the one hand, the history and the design heritage of the particular country can be identified and local characteristics are intensified and reinforced almost stereotypically. On the other hand, airports represent hypermodern functional environments in which processes are internationally standardized and maximally efficient, with a strong emphasis on entertainment and consumption. Guidance systems navigate people through airports. The graphic language creates an image in the viewer’s head carrying the respective identity in its own compact form through color, fonts, and pictograms. The authors, both specialists in the field, decipher this identity and trace its emergence and evolution over the decades. From the perspective of information design, they examine and analyze the wayfinding systems of approximately 70 airports by aligning their identities and functions.

The use of italic letters to accentuate has become common practice in the computer age. They convey movement and dynamics, addresses the emotional experience of reading and reminds of handwriting. This lively characteristic, which once resulted from the movement of the hand, is visibly lost when words are simply tilted by a mouse click. In order to impart basic knowledge about italics, the author has gathered design patterns of italic scripts and presents the tangible form, characteristics and functions of "italic nature". In addition, he deals intensively with the historical development of italics. This monograph is the first detailed treatise on this typographical topic, and is aimed in particular at all those who deal with letters professionally or privately.

How does design function? What is the difference between design and styling? Is the principle "form follows function" still valid? And what constitutes the design process in practice? There are so many questions on the highly topical subject of design. The authors provide answers to many of them by covering a wide range of topics, from the historical roots to the outlook on the near future, from a comprehensive look at product functions to the analysis of the complex design process, from theoretical foundations to descriptive case studies. The central theme is product design, taking the conflicting interests of consumers, manufacturers and designers into consideration. All factors of planning and designing of industrial products are considered and clearly presented. The book is aimed at enquiring users as well as committed entrepreneurs, interested technicians and aspiring designers from a great variety of fields.

Is there a bigger challenge for a designer than the creation of an identity for the Olympic Games? Each venue must have its own unique image that merges national spirit and international trends with the Olympic values of friendship, solidarity, and fairness. This title provides an in-depth overview of the history of the Games, centering visual design aspects for the first time: logos, mascots, medals, pictograms, uniforms, tickets, luggage tags, posters, souvenirs, and much more. Markus Osterwalder presents approximately 6,000 illustrations on over 1,500 pages in two volumes, coming in a slipcase, with fifty-eight chapters that detail astonishing facts and stories about who created what and how. Three foldout sheets give an overview on key design topics from the birth of the Modern Games to the present. For each of the Games, the passionate Swiss collector has chosen comprehensive examples from all desigin fields that enable viewers and readers to fully grasp the design identity of the respective Games. In addition, this title also highlights extraordinarily exciting developments in the field of corporate identity and brand design. Markus Osterwalder, Secretary General of the International Society of Olympic Historians, has one of the biggest Olympic ollections worldwide and is a renowned expert in the field. A graphic designer, Osterwalder has been devoted to the visual history of the Olympic Games for almost thirty years. He started to collect everything from and about the Olympic Games when he attended his first Games in Lillehammer 1994. Recently, he curated the exhibition "Olympic Langauage--Exploring the Look of the Games" at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.