An homage to the design pioneers who defined the Mid-Century aesthetic through their work in furniture, glassware, ceramics and textiles

More than 50 years later, the fascination with mid-century design is stronger than ever before. Explore the popular movement’s distinctive style in this A-Z guide to the 300 influential designers who helped to define it.

From popular icons such as Alvar Aalto, Lina Bo Bardi, Tony Duquette, Charles & Ray Eames, Pierre Jeanneret, Florence Knoll, and Gio Pont...

The exquisitely produced first monograph on innovative and influential British designer Paul Cocksedge

The internationally acclaimed, London-based designer Paul Cocksedge has spent the last two decades building a reputation for experimental multidisciplinary work infused with a sense of simplicity, joy, and wonder. With his keen interest in science and a fascination with how people interact with design, Cocksedge channels his curiosity into creating thought-provoking pieces that challenge per...

This visually stunning investigation of natural and man-made materials will change the way you look at the world around you, while offering hope for the future of our planet.

The first complete monograph on the provocative work of influential Italian designer, architect, and critic Alessandro Mendini

Born in Milan in 1931, Alessandro Mendini created vivid, boundary-pushing, eccentric work that sits in an aesthetic universe of its own. He was at the heart of Italy’s Radical design movement in the 1960s and 1970s and, later, Postmodernism, championing a sensitive and intellectual approach to design; he edited Domus magazine in the early 1980s; and he collaborated ...

DRAWING is the expression of an idea: “Art must come from within, and not from without. This fact has led some to assert that the study of nature is not essential to the student, and that careful training in the study of the representation of the actual appearance is mechanical and harmful. Such persons forget that all art ideas and sentiments must be based upon natural objects, and that a person who cannot represent truly what he sees will be entirely unable to express the simplest ideal c...

Moving beyond the usual genres of form in graphic design’s canonical history, ‘Designing History’ proposes a model centred on bureaucratic instruments of identity, ownership, value, and permission: money, passports, certificates, property deeds, etc. It considers the implications of a design history of the document, where the designer shifts from being a practitioner of conventional design histories to become subject and agency of bureaucratic authority. The book is a revised edition of...

IT is much easier to understand and remember a thing when a reason is given for it, than when we are merely shown how to do it without being told why it is so done; for in the latter case, instead of being assisted by reason, our real help in all study, we have to rely upon memory or our power of imitation, and to do simply as we are told without thinking about it. The consequence is that at the very first difficulty we are left to flounder about in the dark, or to remain inactive till the ma...