Paperzine - News

Steven Heller & Lisa Talarico
Graphic - Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Greatest Graphic Designers
Thames & Hudson

As creatives in more and more disciplines create more and more of their work in digital media, using tablets and graphic pens to work on virtual pages, the sketchbook may well be facing extinction. If it ever goes, with it will go its flow of narrative, its happy accidents, its unexpected connections, its weird and wonderful juxtapositions… all the things that together afford us a visual peak into the subconscious creativity that lies within everyone who has ever idly doodled through a dull meeting – pretty much all of us, in fact.

Sketchbooks are that rare thing – a way of seeing creative thought processes and experimentation, they’re the diaries of Samuel Pepys and the letters of Dr Johnson, they can be read as individual stories or poems, but taken together, they can create something that’s much bigger than the sum of their parts. You sense that this is what Steven Heller and Lita Talarico have attempted to show in Graphic - Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Greatest Graphic Designers, a whopping 352 pages of 750 colour illustrations by some of the world’s leading creatives.

The title’s something of a misnomer, for Heller and Talarico spread their net far and wide for this project to bring into it not just graphic designers but prop designers, illustrators, graffiti artists, fashion designers, typographers, cartoonists and caricaturists, and  the calibre of creatives – including Marian Bantjes, Michael Bierut, Irma Bloom, Sara Fanelli, Milton Glaser, Uwe Loesch, Bruce Mau, Stefan Sagmeister, Art Speigelman and James Victore – is impressive.

In short, punchy interviews these artists, and the other 90 or so whose sketches are gathered here, explain why the sketchbooks exist and what they give them; they’re a way of recording  fleeting ideas and thoughts, of unleashing the subconscious, of  trying out new ideas, of getting started on a project, of warming up visual fluency, of really seeing things, of freestyle experimentation, and through it all, of building a record of the past, or a creative life. And as an absorbing anthology, Graphic does that too, offering an exhaustive collection of artists’ snapshots that build to create a fascinating album showing the state of commercial art at the beginning of the 21^st century.

Are there failings? Possibly it would have been nice to see the artists’ sketches in the context of their client projects, but then as Ken Carbone, co-principal of the New York agency Carbone Smolan says, ‘it is the total aggregate of images, writings and memories that filters down into my projects. These books are a creative database that I draw upon during the design process.’