"THE DESIGNER AS..."
“The Designer As...” by Steven McCarthy BIS Publishers 2013
The Designer As..., written and reseached by Steven McCarthy
Designed by Martin Venezky's Appetite Engineers
Published by BIS Publishers, Amsterdam
Available June 2013.
Preorder here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Designer-as-Collaborator-Communicating/dp/9063692927
The design of this book was an enormous undertaking, but that very undertaking enlivens the pages and becomes its own example of “designer as...”. Because so much of McCarthy’s text references designers, artists, academics and places, I began looking them up online out of personal interest. Then I began placing small images throughout the text as reference points. These smaller reference images slowly took on a life of their own, expanding their presence on the page and relationship to the text. Mostly they illustrate direct citations, but sometimes they act as commentary or humorously refer to neighboring images. Needless to say, this took an ambitious amount of time, both in doing the research (many of the less well-known academic folks are especially hard to locate) and then putting all of these competing forces (including captions) into the book's 248 pages. A complete reference section of every source (url or otherwise) concludes the book.