A rough guide to the world of design.

By roadvermin

We picked up a copy of Le design hier, aujourd'hui, demain : Mode d'emploi (The design of yesterday, today, tomorrow : The way to do it) by Elisabeth Couturier the other day in a book store in Lyon. At first glance we noticed it had lots of cool pictures of the sort of stuff we like and so we decided to fork out the €28.50 necessary to attain a copy for ourselves. On closer inspection in a bar down the street it became apparent to us that this was indeed a good buy for anyone interested in learning more about some of the most influential designers on this century and the works they are responsible for.

It covers the likes of Frank Gehry, Philippe Starck, The Dyson dude, Ora-Ito (I think Ora-Ito is a company) and many more in between that you may or may not of heard of.

My favourite piece in the book is by Tejo Remy of Droog Design and is called Chest of Drawers, its basically 18 individual drawers stacked on top of each other in a random fashion all held together by one of those industrial compression straps.

Throughout there are examples of things old, new, practical, impractical, beautiful, expensive, cheap (Relativly), bizarre and fun, there may even be one or two items you already own like the weird WiFi creature (Apparently its a rabbit) on the cover or the LaCie Lego brick external hard drive.

The book has 255 pages is published by Filipacchi and as far as I know is only available in french but dont let that turn you off just keep a dictionary beside you and youll get the jist, or alternativly learn french. There are probable a million and one design related books like this on the market and this one will not suit all tastes but its never a bad thing to have on the coffee table as a source of potential inspiration. Available from the usual places.

Tagged:
Books design designers Frank Gehry Philippe Starck The Dyson dude Ora-Ito LaCie lego Brick