Hefty · 22 October 2001
You know the type. Big Eurotrash books light on content and heavy with collections of imagery, exhaustive with German attention to detail. Whenever words do smudge the page they are tucked away, small and awkward, unseriffed and pale, like an unpleasant reminder that designers and image architects do not, as yet, rule the world.
In the post today came a large collection from the Magnum photo agency, bound in book form. Lovely photos, ya ya; irony and contrast and innocents in horrible situations. I can’t freaking believe, however, that someone signed off on the design. Phaidon books usually look pretty cro-magnon, but man oh man, this thing: horrible squareish format that makes it impossible to open without ripping at the gutter, set entirely in tiny Interstate, entirely in lowercase (!), entirely without indented paragraphs. The body text, when it shows its scant face, is in pale silver to ensure maximum unreadability. Captions are at a 90º angle in case you weren’t annoyed yet.
Designers. Learn to read. Damn.
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