Studio Culture: The Secret Life of the Design Studio
published by Unit Editions
£24
Why are studios so fascinating? It’s a question that Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook address in Studio Culture, a new book about the graphic designer’s studio that, with its cool, considered design by Spin, is 315 pages of graphic design porn with a difference – useful content.
In an introduction that sets an enjoyable and insightful tone for a book made up of revealing quotes from designers alongside snapshots of their studio, a series of in-depth interviews, and an extensive album of studio portraits, Shaughnessy defines the design studio as ‘a combination of three things: the physical space, the people who occupy that space, and the work they produce.’ It’s a succinct and useful definition that sums up our fascination with studios as largely private spaces we don’t normally get to see in which people create things. The great thing about the spaces described and revealed in Studio Culture is that we can stare to our hearts’ content and nobody minds.
It’s rare to hear designers talk publicly about the ways in which they develop and run their studios, so the 28 penetrating interviews with creative heads of studios are welcome, particularly as they deal with not only the mechanics of building and maintaining a vibrant studio culture, but also the philosophies, hopes, backgrounds and direction of each studio. The accompanying shots reveal as much in their similarities as their differences, and while Europe predominates with intimate studios like Fuel (London), Coast (Belgium), Mucho (Spain), Surface (Germany) and R2 (Portugal), big names feature too, including Doyle Partners and Milton Glaser in the US and, back in Europe, Eden Spiekermann in Germany and Holland and 4Creative in the UK.
But it’s in the final section of the book that the real big guns come out. Here, a collection of studio portraits ranging from the historical to contemporary make great photographs in their own right, but add that these are the spaces inhabited by the likes of Alan Fletcher, FHK Henrion, Mark Farrow, Ed Fella, Jessica Helfand, Domenic Lippa and Peter Saville, and they amount to much more than the sum of their parts. The same is true of Studio Culture. If ultimately by seeing the space we somehow hope to understand the nature of magic, of what it means to make things, this book goes some way towards helping us do that.
BUSTE CENTURY ISPIRA
TINTORETTO CEYLON
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