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[drawdownbooks]

We don't just make books, we make bookends too!

Durable powder-coated steel construction (made in the USA), and a classic L-shape form designed to keep your books in place. 5.5 in. × 5.25 in. One piece. Designed by Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda

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Space as Language: The Properties of Typographic Space

This publication, part of the Cambridge Elements: Publishing and Book Culture series, examines the function and significance of typographic space. Readers are invited to consider in turn the space within letters, the space between letters, the space between lines, and the margin space surrounding the text-block, to develop the hypothesis that viewed collectively these constitute a 'metalanguage' complementary to the text.

Drawing upon critical perspectives from printing, typeface design, typography, avant-garde artistic practice, and design history, Space as Language examines the connotative values and philosophies embodied in the form and disposition of space. These include the values attributed to symmetry and asymmetry, the role of "active" space in the development of modernist typography, the debated relationship between type and writing, the divergent ideologies of the printing industry and the letter arts, and the impact of successive technologies upon both the organization and the perception of typographic space.

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2023

Softcover, 75 pages, 5 × 7 inches

ISBN: 978-1-00-926543-0

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Harber Type Specimen (A2 version) by Benoît Bodhuin

Harber is a dot matrix design with variable axes for weight, slant, volume, noise, and optical size.

Published by Benoît Bodhuin, 2023

1 double-sided sheet, 5-color Risograph, 16.5 × 23.4 inches Ships folded, dimensions 8.3 × 11.7 inches

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A Line Which Forms a Volume 4

On sale! A Line Which Forms a Volume 4 comes to you from the London College of Communication where students in the MA Graphic Media Design program put together ALWFV on a regular basis. Issue 4 focuses on the constructed borders of the design canon. How do design practices move and cross borders? Contributors include Ahmed Ansari, Clara Balaguer, Yu Jiwon, Lucas LaRochelle, and more. Designed by Yao Qi and Zhu Yiting.

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Means of Production: Indigenous Patterns, Forms, and Letters Join Fillip and design educators Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda (nłeʔképmx) of Draw Down Books on Saturday, January 27, for a typography workshop presented in collaboration with the Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda will guide participants through a hands-on program intended to deepen understanding of the profound connection between language, culture, and design, with a particular focus on the nuances and cultural specificity of Indigenous patterns from Native North American communities. The workshop will encourage individuals to consider the stories and symbolism behind each stroke and curve, and explore the intricate relationship between cultural heritage and the visual language of typography.

Entrance is free but space is limited, and registration is required. All are welcome; priority registration will be provided for Indigenous participants.

More info and to register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/means-of-production-indigenous-patterns-forms-and-letters-tickets-788674254927

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Just arrived from Europe! Slanted's Yearbook of Lettering

Letters and typefaces not only transport information, but create a feeling or have a personality. Lettering takes this even a step further: with its movement, artistic strokes, and variety, it has the potential to radiate a whole range of energies, telling stories of harmony and distortion about positive and negative space. Words become drawings and pictures themselves.

Born out of the success of the concept of their Yearbook of Type series Slanted created the Yearbook of Lettering, which presents a selection of lettering artwork from around the world—from traditional calligraphy and hand lettering, street art and graffiti, to 3D digital lettering, showcasing the vibrant and wide range of 21st-century styles and techniques.

Both a catalog and reference work, the Yearbook of Lettering can help clients source the right artist for a project, and can be a source of inspiration for those in the design world. The volume celebrates the many facets of lettering that continue to flourish and evolve, platforming the most exemplary artists and providing a glimpse into a world of color, sweeps, curls, brushstrokes, and pure creative energy.

Art direction by Tessa Breuer with graphic design assistance from Juliane Nöst

Published by Slanted Publishers, 2023

Hardcover, 320 pages, full color, 6.4 × 9.5 inches

ISBN: 978-3-94-844053-4

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For almost 50 years, Brazilian-born New York–based artist Lydia Okumura (b. 1948), like her contemporaries Dorothea Rockburne and Robert Irwin, has explored the realm of geometric abstraction by challenging our perception of space in her sculptures, installations, and works on paper. In the 1970s, as a young artist in her native São Paulo, she was introduced to Conceptual art, Minimalism, Land Art, and Arte Povera through the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techou. These movements, along with Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism, influenced Okumura’s dynamic work in which she uses simple materials such as string, glass and paint to balance line, plane and shadow.

This handsome exhibition catalog, produced to accompany the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery and to encourage a critical reassessment of Okumura’s oeuvre within art history, is a rich document of her minimal practice and independent vision. The catalog includes an essay on Okumura and her work by curator Rachel Adams; an account of vanguardism in Brazilian art from 1960 to 1975 by art historian Mari Rodriguez Binnie; a conversation between Adams and Okumura; and extensive photo documentation of Okumura’s work from the 1970s until today.

Edited by Rachel Adams & Charlie Tatum

Designed by Mark Owens with Sarah Cleeremans

Published by Sternberg Press and the UB Art Galleries Printed in an edition of 1,200 copies

In English and Portuguese

Softcover, 112 pages, 48 b&w and 56 color images, 9.5 × 11.5 inches

ISBN: 978-3-95679-291-5

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This book is incredible! Seeing <—> Making: Room for Thought is an image-packed deep dive into McLuhan and Benjamin, a collaboration between philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, Adam Michaels, and Kevin McCaughey of Boot Boyz Biz. The volume makes theory visible in a captivating way, and traverses history, politics and aesthetics as well as visual culture. Shipping now!

Designed by Kevin McCaughey and IN-FO-CO (Adam Michaels, Shannon Harvey, V.E. Chen)

Published by Inventory Press, 2024

Softcover, 400 pages, 600 b&w images, 4.75 × 7.75 inches

ISBN: 978-1-94-175353-8

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52 stories on type, typography, and graphic design. A fascinating journey through the world of typography.

Every day something is happening in the world of typography and graphic design – something new is being created in Buenos Aires, Paris, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Seoul or Melbourne.

For this volume, the most inspiring, trend-setting, and enduring stories, events, and works have been collected together: 52 entries for 52 weeks, written by more than 40 experts.

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Shop our annual sale and find gems like this rare FIRST ISSUE of SOFA!

SOFA was a magazine that uncovered and defined its present and looked into the near future by exploring one tantalizing, terrifying, tantamount, or taboo topic per issue while sitting on international sofas with the day's most interesting people. The first issue dove into the minds of Generation Z by giving the floor to a diverse group of international teenagers.

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The definitive visual history of the spaceships, alien landscapes, cryptozoology, and imagined industrial machinery of 1970s paperback sci-fi art and the artists who created these extraordinary images. Designed by Eli Mock, published by Abrams Books, 2023.

Learn more at Draw Down!

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Diagramming Modernity: Books and Graphic Design in Latin America, 1920–1940 This massive publication offers the first comprehensive panorama of the Latin American illustrated book between the 1920s and 1940s, a period characterized by the region's rapid modernization. The books reproduced here encapsulate this transformative era, expressing and embodying emergent national and continental narratives in Latin American countries.

Diagramming Modernity reproduces more than 1,000 illustrated first editions, analyzing the cornucopia of cultural narratives they contain. In addition to showcasing relatively unknown work by many consecrated artists, the publication also boasts an extensive repertoire of avant-garde artists largely forgotten until today.

Chapters are devoted to countries and to specific themes such as Word-Image, Verbal Visualities, Pre-Columbianisms and Ancestralisms, and Social and Political Graphics.

Writers and thinkers Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, Riccardo Boglione, Juan Manuel Bonet, Mariana Garone Gravier and Dafne Cruz Porchini conscientiously investigate these themes and more.

Edited by Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales and Riccardo Boglione

With texts by Juan Manuel Bonet, Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, Riccardo Boglione, Marina Garone Gravier, and Dafne Cruz Porchini

Designed by José Luis Lugo

Published by Editoriale RM and Ediciones La Bahía, 2023

Hardcover, 876 pages, 1500 color images, 9 × 12.25 inches

ISBN: 978-8-41-797579-1

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Graduation 2020 Design Academy Eindhoven

Published by the Design Academy Eindhoven on the occasion of its 2020 graduation show, this catalog is an example of what has been referred to as the extreme present. At once intimidating and intoxicating, it is built around a reality that was in a state of accelerated flux. The catalog's relevance depended on the ability to uninterruptedly interpret this evolving reality.

The graduation projects in this volume were largely conceived in a past that seemed very distant at the time of publication, in the midst of a global pandemic. However, in many ways, this body of work is also anticipatory, looking forward to the future that promises a return to embodied practice.

A series of hypothetical news headlines were generated by an open-source tool that was fed with written descriptions of all 185 graduate projects. The works became a dataset, and the generated headlines reveal the collective (sub)consciousness of the graduating class. The assorted headlines unveil surprising trends, methodologies, biases, and desires, allowing for new connections to be made between the projects.

Designed by Ward Goes with Mia Tamme

Published by Design Academy Eindhoven, 2020

Softcover, 506 pages, 6.69 × 9.45 inches

ISBN: 978-9-49-140045-2

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Who the Hell is Müller-Brockmann?

What are the underlying reasons for the success or failure of a design manifesto? How can cultural exchange bring new value to the field of graphic design? At the end of the day is the contemporary scene still truly innovative or simply basking in past glories?

Over the course of a residency at a London gallery, Swiss designer Demian Conrad invited an array of graphic designers and typographers past and present to share the anecdotes, stories and scandals that have marked the international design scene over the course of the last century. The result is Who the Hell is Müller-Brockmann? an examination of the ways in which the Swiss Style influenced British graphic design and vice versa.

This celebration of the ongoing dialogue and collaboration that has existed between the design traditions of these two countries also lays bare the divergences and conflicts that lie beneath the surface, and examines how such things as a typeface or a layout grid can come to have such an enduring impact on a global community and elicit such strong emotions.

Each participant was asked to bring a design-related artifact that represents their personal connection with the Swiss Style, all of which are presented in this volume. These images and the dialogues they generate create a bridge between the typographic traditions and practices of Britain and Switzerland.

With an essay by Adrian Shaughnessy

Contributors include Bruno Maag, Fraser Muggeridge, Freda Sack, Holger Jacobs, Michele Jannuzzi, Richard Hollis, Robin Kinross, and Sara De Bondt

Edited by Demian Conrad

Published by Niggli Verlag, 2022

Softcover, 208 pages, 150 images, 4.76 × 7.28 inches

ISBN: 978-3-72-121007-1

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A5/02 Philips – Twen: Realism is the Score

Between 1961 and 1968, the magazine Twen produced a series of LP recordings in collaboration with the Philips record label. During this period, all editions of Twen were accompanied by LPs drawn from the realms of jazz, classical music, radio plays, world music, or pop. For the designs of his record covers, art director Willy Fleckhaus used Concrete Art by Karl Gerstner, Max Bill, and other dedicated graphic designers such as Heinz Edelmann and Günther Kieser. This now-forgotten series, comprising around 70 discs, is a masterful instance of the conjunction of music and graphic design. In collaboration with music archives and private collections, this rare series is reunited in its entirety and documented in this publication.

This volume is part of the Lars Müller A5 series, intended as a growing archive of graphic design. Each volume introduces outstanding personalities and important themes from the history of international graphic design, with numerous illustrations, essays, and interviews. A5 is a cooperation between the labor visuell in the design department at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf and Lars Müller Publishers.

Designed by Jens Müller

Published by Lars Müller Publishers, 2009

In German and English

Softcover, 96 pages, full color, 5.75 × 8.25 inches

ISBN 978-3-03778-180-7

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Kris Sowersby: The Art of Letters is a visual feast of letterforms celebrating one of the world’s leading type designers. The 800 page publication examines Sowersby’s letter drawing practice while considering the characters as independent works of art, exploring their interconnections of function and style. It champions the absurd beauty involved in creating multiple expressions of predetermined alphabets through nuance and theory.

While a typeface is a well considered set of many elements, if one removes the context of language systems and alphabets, each character may be viewed as a singular abstract drawing, as art in their own right. As presented in this book, it allows us to re-see, or to see for the first time, their individual form and function.

As Sowersby expresses, “There is no definitive form of the alphabet. The alphabet is a concept made concrete through countless written and designed letterforms; the alphabet is not defined by a single typeface but expressed through all of them. There’s sets of rules, largely unwritten rules, of how a typeface is put together, about relationships between letterforms and between styles”.

Printed one per page in black on cream paper, the publication features over 750 large character illustrations selected from Klim typefaces including Calibre, Domaine, Founders Grotesk, Heldane, National, Signifier, Söhne and Untitled.

The volume features an essay—"What We Read When We See"—by graphic designer, writer and educator Paul McNeil and a foreword by Formist publisher and designer Mark Gowing.

Kris Sowersby: The Art of Letters is finished with black-edged pages and the dust jacket features gold foil-stamped custom typography. Sowersby and Gowing collaborated on a custom typeface used to typeset the book. Inspired by the rich history of rotunda typefaces, its use is exclusive to the publication.

Edited by Mark Gowing and Dave Foster

Designed by Formist

Published by Formist Editions, 2021

Paperback, 800 pages, b&w and color images, 6 × 7.9 inches

ISBN: 978-0-64-859634-9

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A is A is A (Catalog)

Since 2016, graphic designer Marcello Jacopo Biffi has been obsessively researching alphabets.

Alphabets is Biffi's visual research project in the field of typography. It consists of a group of related alphabets, which share the same DNA but look considerably different. Structured on the same elementary pixel matrix—the archetype, or basic form of the alphabet—the set has undergone multiple digital transformations, producing atypical results. The order of execution, the intensity of the distortion, the number of steps are some of the variables in the serendipitous design process that determine the result, which is never final: each alphabet is a frame taken from a variation sequence progressively moving away from its point of origin. 

The goal is to generate a collection of allographs (different signs representing the same letter) to explore the relationship between glyph (representation of a letter) and grapheme (the minimum unit of a writing system). The result is a formal inquiry into the identity of letter shapes, and, if possible, an attempt to reject this very concept.

This catalog was produced to accompany Biffi's A is A is A exhibition at Marsèll Paradise gallery in Milan. The name of the exhibition is a  nod to Gertrude Stein's famous quote, "A rose is a rose is a rose," affirming Aristotle's law of identity. A selection of Biffi's alphabets—Alphabets 1-8—are presented alongside related film and screen-based projects.

The catalog collects together a replica set of the sheets of paper used to construct the 2020 exhibition, along with loose sheets with essays about the project. Distributed in a screenprinted envelope, the publication's form references Marcel Duchamp's idea of a portable exhibition in a package.

Designed by Marcello Jacopo Biffi Text in Italian

Loose leaf, comes sealed in 1-color screenprinted envelope, 11.75 × 8.5 inches