Product Reviews

If there were awards for book titles, One Hundred at 360°: Graphic Design's New Global Generation would be unlikely to trouble the judges. What the authors (a designer and a design journalist) are trying to get across is that they've rounded up 100 designers from around the world.

All of these whippersnappers, we're told, have 'set up shop' since the turn of the century, and the introduction muses on how 'setting up shop' can mean many different things in our post-salaried portfolio-working society. It also witters on annoyingly about how financial success often isn't the main motivator for this new generation of practitioners. By the time they have mortgages to feed and kids to pay, they'll be just as keen on cash as the rest of us, surely? If it's really just for the love of it that they are doing what, for anyone who aspires to competence, is at least a full-time job, that's dilettantism, not democratisation.

Anyway, this thick, square book is packed with interesting work and demonstrates that if anything unites today's up-and-coming graphic designers, it's a merciful lack of unity. True, there's a fair amount of stuff that hasn't moved on from the 1990s - Helvetica Neue, Tom Hingston warpage - and 21st century clichés are not unrepresented

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(yes, there are black-and-white nudes entwined with flowery emo doodlings). But there are some proper new twists on divisionism, welcome rediscoveries of Gilliamesque retro repro cutup, and enough uncategorisable originality to reassure old-timers that standards aren't falling. One of our favourite pieces is Dress Code's identity for the MTV Video Music Awards. Is that sad? One of our least favourite is the Excel pixel art. That's sad.

The captioning is perfunctory and not entirely literate, but each entrant is fully profiled in a central section, with contact details in case you're inspired to hire any of them instead of just ripping off their ideas.

Though good value as usual, Contemporary Graphic Design is not Taschen's most dazzlingly successful effort. Bound in hard covers with a smart acetate jacket, it's set in three languages in the kind of tiny and off-puttingly stodgy type more usually found in the less imaginative exhibition catalogues. Quotes from and details of each designer are provided, but in a style that makes you feel tired before you attempt to read anything. The contents listing is even more illegible, and the foreword merely namechecks a standard list of ethical and aesthetic issues without contributing many new thoughts.

This appears to be more comprehensive than the Laurence King title, but in fact features only 15 more names. We've become mildly obsessed with trying to figure out how Dvid Fldvri was included while Olivier Kugler was not, but the selection is credible enough, with enough wild cards to avoid total overlap with other collections, and will sort you out if you haven't invested in any graphics showcase books since about 1997. The main problem is that not very much of the content feels any more contemporary than that. For a taste of right now, One Hundred at 360° is a better buy.