Pentagram:The Compendium

Rating:
Summary: Not exactly cutting edge ...
Review: Pentagram's Compendium is, as far as I'm concerned, not a very exciting book. There is a sense of déjà vu all over the place. There are some happy exceptions, but generally it's the kind of design that has been around for at least 10 years. There is a lot which is clever, witty and beautiful in the conventional sense, but all too often the design collapses under its own weight. There is so little excitement! Compare this to Bruce Mau's Life Style which is an achievement in a different league. I think Mau has his finger on the pulse of our age. He wrestles heroically with the contradictions and paradoxes of his work and his book vibrates with these worries and tensions. The Pentagram book is much more suave. This is not surprising given that the collective was founded in the early seventies by a bunch of 30-plus designers. The most interesting aspect of their approach has nothing to do with their design: it's their loosely coupled organisation with seventeen partners working in three different cities that has managed to thrive over three decades. I assume that many of the corporate dinosaurs of today will continue to call on Pentagram's undoubtedly solid design expertise. But the vicissitudes of the cybereconomy demand a more vicious, tormented and volatile kind of design. For that I would revert to Mau.

Rating:
Summary: Not exactly cutting edge ...
Review: Pentagram's Compendium is, as far as I'm concerned, not a very exciting book. There is a sense of déjà vu all over the place. There are some happy exceptions, but generally it's the kind of design that has been around for at least 10 years. There is a lot which is clever, witty and beautiful in the conventional sense, but all too often the design collapses under its own weight. There is so little excitement! Compare this to Bruce Mau's Life Style which is an achievement in a different league. I think Mau has his finger on the pulse of our age. He wrestles heroically with the contradictions and paradoxes of his work and his book vibrates with these worries and tensions. The Pentagram book is much more suave. This is not surprising given that the collective was founded in the early seventies by a bunch of 30-plus designers. The most interesting aspect of their approach has nothing to do with their design: it's their loosely coupled organisation with seventeen partners working in three different cities that has managed to thrive over three decades. I assume that many of the corporate dinosaurs of today will continue to call on Pentagram's undoubtedly solid design expertise. But the vicissitudes of the cybereconomy demand a more vicious, tormented and volatile kind of design. For that I would revert to Mau.