Rick Poynor Lecture

A few days ago I attended a lecture by Rick Poynor at Sheffield Hallam University. Poynor is a writer who has a real interest in design monographs. He reviews monographs in magazines etc but also produces and writes monographs. He founded Eye Magazine and the Observer Forum and was in the Helvetica Film. He spoke at length about design monographs and how they are for the 'star' of the design world. They are not very good to critically analyse as there is no right and wrong with them and they can be very opinion based pieces.

The art monograph is the set pattern for monographs and mostly have very simple layouts which integrate text and image well but are often seen as boring.

The monograph can be seen as self interpretation. In the work of Jonathan Barnbrook the work is shown as a whole new construction as it is layered on top of other work aswell as the content and it becomes new work in itself. Layers of 4-5 bits of work are sometimes on each page.

In the case of my favourite designer Stefan Sagmeister, he turns the monograph into a joke and even says at the start of his book 'not another design monograph'. He doesnt take himself so seriously and annotates his own work which is interesting.

The monograph can be for self documentation in the way Neville Brody uses it. His look is old fashioned now because of all the white space but it documented all of his work really well.

Poynor also spoke about the future of the monograph which isn't obvious because of the rise in web based information. The internet is so easily accessed it means that monographs are getting less sales. Now publishers tend to bear the cost so they have to be very cautious when it comes to producing monographs.