A Typographic Provocation Worth Your Shelf Space
As a branding curator, I endorse What Was Design? for its relentless clarity and tactile conviction. Florian Walzel and Paul Jürgens orchestrate 87 one sentence declarations into a compact typographic argument. The cover repeats cyan type on charcoal stock, making typography a structural statement rather than ornament. Each spread treats quotes like editorial headlines, bold serif forms center aligned and scaled to the page. This book models how design can use form to interrogate meaning, and how objects can host debate. Material choices like thread stitching and ultraviolet endpapers articulate a quiet, rigorous authorship. It feels deliberate, compact, intimate. Exactly.
Inside, Walzel frames the quotations with a thoughtful essay that refuses neat closure. The second half moves to a subtler grid, footnotes, and a chronology that makes debate legible. A year register links contributors from 1925 to 2023, mapping discourse with color coded clarity. As designers and brand stewards, we should study how restraint foregrounds argument over ornament. Buy it for its typographic courage, its editorial discipline, and its ability to spark conversations in studios. Read the original post to see spreads, design details, and the editors rationale in full. This compact book rewards close reading and repeated returns daily.
Source: abduzeedo.com
