Book Review: New Graphic Design: The 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers

Today's graphic heroes

The cover says: 'The 100 best contemporary graphic designers' and it's probably true because as I looked through the pages I was overwhelmed by the creativity and control evident in so many of these examples. The range of work is impressive, obviously print comes first with books, brochures and posters but also included is packaging, exhibitions, web pages and more.

My favourites in the book include Irma Boom's remarkable publications, Loise Fili and her beautiful typographic covers, Hilary Greenbaum's work for the New York Times magazine 'Who made that' feature, Aron Jancso with some clever typographic designs he produced for himself and Oliver Munday who created an alphabet out of those cheap miniature plastic soldiers kids play with. There are two other alphabets that caught my eye, one using fashion photography of body parts from Yvette Yang and another from Zim & Zou using woven orange, blue and white thread. Oddly there are hardly any logos in the book.

The hundred designers featured (and this includes design groups) each get between three and six pages, the first one includes their design philosophy (predictably they're rather repetitive) training, location and website. All the images in these mini portfolios are reproduced large enough to get a feel of each project and they all have captions though I think it would have been helpful to have included the dimensions and maybe a reference to paper and printing process. The book is printed on a good matt art with a 175 screen.

The Fiells have edited a worthwhile overview of contemporary graphic design which should interest any one who works in this area of creativity.

New Graphic Design: The 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

New Graphic Design: The 100 Best Contemporary Graphic Designers