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A Review by Barry Gray

The Moving Metropolis is subtitled “A History of London’s Transport since 1800”.  Thus it will come as no surprise that this is a general history rather than a book dedicated to graphic design. Equally, in view of the importance of design and signing to the various undertakings which became London Transport, signs, posters, maps and typefaces feature often in this illustrated history.  The influence of Frank Pick (who became Managing Director of the Underground Group) is mentioned and it was Pick who commissioned Edward Johnson to design the famous typeface for the Underground as well as promoting the high quality publicity and the new station designs of Charles Holden.

This is basically a book of illustrations with informative captions with sections introduced by short essays taking the reader over two centuries from 1800 to the new millennium. The book is published in association with London’s Transport Museum and concentrates, not unnaturally therefore, on London Transport and its predecessors.  In reality, the subtitle would be better off without the apostrophe ‘s’ as the main line railways are dealt with cursorily.  As a comparison, the Metropolitan Railway has 60 references in the index and the Southern Railway 3, despite the fact that almost all of South London was covered by the SR network.

This type of illustrated publication is clearly not intended to be a definitive history book. Despite being broken down into periods (such as “The Birth of London Transport, Designed for the Capital, 1918 – 1939), the content can feel rather bitty at times.

Nevertheless, what must be in excess of 1000 illustrations are generally well chosen and are accompanied by descriptive paragraphs with useful background details. Overall an enormous amount of information has been conveyed.

Not perhaps the definitive publication for the student of either design or transport history, this is, nonetheless, a nicely produced volume conveying the flavour of how London Transport developed from its beginnings into the complex system of buses, trains, tubes, trams and river boats that we know today.

Review by John Waites

The big idea behind Wayshowing is that the objective of signage should be to show the user of signs the way, rather than requiring the user to find the way. According to Per Mollerup, wayshowing and wayfinding relate to each other as do writing and reading, teaching and learning, or cooking and eating. Perhaps a closer analogy might be to point of sale and point of purchase. For years point of sale was the usual term, until marketing practitioners moved the emphasis to the purchase by the consumer.

The book is divided into two main sections, Principles and Practices. For a signage professional, some of the material feels a little too obvious. However, Per Mollerup roams widely across sign design and implementation, including familiar areas such as contrast, fonts, sign positioning and signs for the visually impaired.

The section on Practices includes cases from environments that depend on signage, including hospitals, airports, railways, museums and cities. For students or those setting out on a career in sign design, the book is comprehensive and will prove extremely useful.

The best part of the book is the 436 pictures. From the photo credits it is clear that most of these come from Per Mollerup’s personal collection, and impressive it is. It includes material that will be very familiar to SDS members, such as the National Maritime Museum signage, and even the SDS icon, as well as less familiar items from around the world. All are well judged.
Sometimes the book’s approach seems somewhat contrived. For example, the terms signs and SIGNS are used. The explanation for this is:

“This book uses the word 'sign' with two different meanings. The first covers the sign outside a butcher’s shop, directional signs in an airport, traffic signs in the street, and so on. The other meaning uses the word 'sign' to stand for any phenomenon that has a meaning. That usage is related to Umberto Eco's definition of a sign as anything that human beings can use to lie. To discern between the two meanings, this book presents the word 'sign' in lower case letters when it has the narrow meaning, and 'SIGN'……when it has the broad meaning.” There is a helpful section on the planning process, which would make a useful aide memoire for most sign designers. This splits the process into:

1. Defining the problem.
2. Composing the team.
3. Gathering information.
4. Analysing data.
5. Developing a wayshowing strategy.
6. Planning signage.
7. Designing graphics.
8. Designing hardware.
9. Implementing the plan.
10. Evaluating results.

The quality of the pictures and print is high, which goes some way to explaining its price tag of £33. When I looked on Amazon, they had a used version at £19.99, and (rather puzzlingly) two others at £39.28 and £42.14. Not cheap, but good value.

John Waites has spent his working life in the sign industry and is a member of SDS steering group.

Reviewed by Richard Dragun

Robert Brownjohn's cult status amongst designers derived from his ability to capture the experimental spirit of the 1960s with brilliant graphic ideas, whilst ' living fast' and inevitably 'dying young'. His life really did lend credibility to the maxim ‘if you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there!’ For those of us who weren't really there, the first ever monograph on this iconic figure of graphic design provides a valuable reference for designers and film fans alike, whilst giving us a glimpse of the changing world of advertising and film in the liberated atmosphere of the 1960s.

The content is presented in two halves; his life and his work. The first half traces his life and career via a chronology of reminiscences, anecdotes and events. The format is simple and direct, a timeline reading like a series of diary entries highlighting what he did, where and with whom. The list of contributors reads like a roll-call of the great and the good from the world of advertising, design and entertainment, some of whom still seem not to have recovered from the experience of knowing him.

Robert Brownjohn (Bj to his friends) was born in New Jersey in 1925 and by the age of twelve had started to put all his efforts into the study of art, finally entering the Institute of Design in Chicago to study under the Bauhaus émigré Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Brownjohn was inspired by Moholy-Nagy's experimental approach to design and even taught at the Institute before moving to New York in 1950.

As co-founder of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar he produced ground breaking work for Pepsi Cola, Pirelli, Columbia Records and the US Pavilion at the 1959 Brussels World's Fair.  He was a devotee of the New York jazz scene and befriended the musicians Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Charlie Parker.  He was also a habitual drug-taker.

In 1960 he moved to London (having split with Chermayeff and Geismar) to start afresh and change his lifestyle. Indeed, he did start afresh, and together with other US émigrés, brought energy and vitality to London's fledgling graphic design scene. However, his drug habit soon took over once again and he died in 1970, just days before his 45th birthday.

The second half of the book is devoted to his work and is copiously illustrated with material from a relatively small archive but one that demonstrates the ingenious combinations of typography, illustration and found objects that became Brownjohn's hallmark and the inspiration to the generation of designers who followed.

Brownjohn's career was too short for there to have been unproductive years and this part of the book feels like a 'complete works'. These are not case studies; in fact, very little insight is given into what led up to the finished works. This in itself is appropriate because his genius lay in making a solution appear to have been totally spontaneous which actually disguised the fact that, although able to produce inspirational solutions, he often worked at being 'spontaneous' for hours or even days. His great friend Alan Fletcher writes in the foreword to the book “he liked his ideas to seem off-the cuff. He liked to seem lazy, but he could work hard at it”.

The title 'Sex and Typography' is taken from the article in 'Typographica' from December 1964 in which Brownjohn implied that the idea for his famous poster 'Obsession & Fantasy' sprang from his disordered mind. However, it seems more likely that this work, as well as the famous 'watching words move' advertisements for Midland Bank and film titles for 'From Russia with Love' and 'Goldfinger' owed much to MoholyNagy's teachings that “literature can be defined as the verbalised form of communication generated by psychological and biological forces”.

The belief that words carry emotional as well as intellectual connotations was central to Brownjohn's approach to advertising typography. The 'Obsession & Fantasy' poster is a perfect example of the experience Moholy-Nagy described as 'simultaneity'; in other words seeing and reading, both at once.

For Brownjohn life and work were inextricable, though the two-part format of the book attempts to separate design from biography. We will never fully know the extent to which his habits and lifestyle were related to his genius – but wherever it came from, his talent is beyond dispute, and as a homage to one of graphic design's greatest creative geniuses it is a must for every designer, whether they remember the '60s or not.

Richard Dragun

by Simon James

In this photographically illustrated book, James turns a curious and unsentimental eye on the relationship between the London Underground system (including its signs) and the people who use it. Its a book about gaps...between designer and user, staff and passenger.

by Peter Wildbur and Michael Burke (Authors)

Over 300 interesting photographs and illustrations of great information design projects, with a section on sign design and transport route maps called ‘Informing the traveller’ and another section on map design called ‘Mapping internal and external worlds’.

Its a really good overview of good information design.

by Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon (Authors)

Letterforms surround us. This book focuses on them and the typography found in public places.

Over 700 colour image grouped thematically, including ‘signs to direct and instruct’ and ‘naming places and defining spaces’.

The authors have given some fascinating talks on the subject to the SDS.