Reservocation | Book Reviews

Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World
—Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor is a writer and design critic who, in 1990, founded graphic communications magazine Eye. He remained as editor there until 1997 and is now a resident columnist. Poynor also writes for Print, Graphis, Adbusters, and I.D. magazines, among others. He is author of several books including Design without Boundaries: Visual Communication in Transition, which is his first collection of essays, published in 1998.

Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World is a collection of critical essays on media and culture, which have previously been published in various magazines and books over the last

few years. Poynor looks at the commercial artist’s role in our consumer-driven society and the impact media saturation is having on our culture — globally, as well as individually. What are our attitudes towards advertising, towards corporations, and towards globalization? These are all some of the topics that are explored. Poynor places everything under the microscope including Wallpaper magazine, Lomo cameras, branded journalism, Diesel, graphic sex, Tibor Kalman, RayGun magazine, Stereolab’s album covers, Bluewater shopping mall, and many others.

Also included in the book are essays that Poynor has written on the topic of the First Things First manifestos.

First Things Next, addresses the heated debates, backlash, and call to arms that the revision to the original manifesto, First Things First, has brought with it. You can find a copy of First Things First 2000 on the Adbusters web site for reference.

On many levels, Obey the Giant is a needed and challenging benchmark of where we have been and where we may be going both as visual communicators and as a society.

Emigre

review by: Jarrett Kertesz

Designershock: The User Manual

E-zine Designershock has created DSOS1 (Designer Shock Operating System 1). It is the cumulative efforts of Berlin-based Stefan Gandl, Rob Meek and Birte Ludwig with coding help from Michael Kuphal, Christoph Schuster, and Mike Kelly.

A beautiful marriage of media, from the Letraset inspired layout of the manual to the Atari 2600-esque games available through the CDROM (once connected to the Internet), Designershock have created a thorough and warm brand for themselves. In addition, the book doubles as a mousepad. Very sexy.

There’s a lot of information in the User Manual and I found it the best

place to start exploring DSOS1. It explains where the different components of the DSOS1 are and how these parts relate to each other. The manual, besides showing the Designershock sensibility offline, is a needed reference while playing the games or for instructions to use the programs. It’s not overwhelming if you start from the beginning and slowly go through each little section. There is actually a nice pacing to it and it gives you a great over-view of Designershock and the DSOS1.

Once you have the CDROM in and create your profile, the DS Booter prompts you to login (“What are you waiting for?”). A browser will then connect you to the DSOS1 Online Emulation. From here, you can start

playing the quirky games, working in any of the four programs, or download various extras.

The joining of application and design puts another twist on the role of designer as author. Not only are designers today producing their own content via Flash, video or the Web, but also, a new generation of designers will be pushing things even further conceptually. With creatives like Designershock taking interactivity to another level, it will be interesting to see where this trend goes.

Die Gestalten Verlag

review by: Jarrett Kertesz