Design Source Book

A visual preference to design from 1850 to the present day by Penny Sparke, Felice Hodges, Anne Stone and Emma Dent Coad.

I would recommend this book as a visual aid for differentiating the different eras as it covers a wide range and talks about the inspiration for each era. What I find interesting is how the design style evolves from one to the next.

I decided to do a separate book review for this one as I believe it is really useful and much organised. It is laid out in chronological order starting from the Arts and Crafts movement in 1850 to the ‘Styles of today’ in 1987. To be fair, this book is a little out of date, but that does not hinder the relevance of the information shared here. Each chapter is based around one design era. Each chapter also has the same format. Sparke introduces you to style and then moves on to the inspirations behind the style. Once the basis of the style is clear in the reader’s mind the author then introduces us to famous theorists of that time and discusses some of their work as well as their history. The next subchapter surrounds itself on the ‘spirit’ of the design period. This section is all about what it actually means to be a part of a particular design age and how the style evolved within the movement. Finally, Sparke goes back and reviews famous influences and more importantly pin points where the movement began, continued, and how it spread from one country to another. This last point is really important and I feel as if most other sources on design history leave this out, so as a reader you do not get to see the full picture. It is easy for us to assume that this was a global trend, which in some cases were true but even then each culture interpreted the movement differently, whether it was due to style, religion, resources etc.

An example of this would be the machine age. The industrial revolution was occurring all over the world but in some places it was developing a lot faster than in others. Thus making the machine aesthetic thrive within Europe and the USA.

One of my favourite features in this book is that under the sub title ‘Inspirations’ there is a small section dedicated to fonts. This is something that I have never seen anywhere else in terms of source books or even thought about researching. The author of this book talks about the type face of the design era:

The Design Source Book makes researching much easier and a lot more interesting and visual. It is something that I would use over and over again to get a better understanding of a certain time period. This would make help make my future projects and presentations much more realistic in terms of aesthetics and manufacturing processes.

#contextualstudies