Fresh Dialogue 1: New Voices in Graphic Design

Stemming from a 1999 lecture and slide show for the New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, this crisply designed book with almost 150 images is sure to be of interest to designers everywhere. The works included here come from the personal and professional lives of three young designers: Nicholas Blechman, Christoph Neimann, Paul Sahre. Blechman is the art director of the New York Times Op-Ed section, and met the other two through his self-published political 'zone, Nozone-samples from which constitute about a fifth of the book. Neimann is German a freelance illustrator for a number of well-known magazines, and a teacher at the School of Visual Arts. His samples have a slightly quirky and offbeat amusing air concealed in their simplicity. Sahre is a well known book cover designer and postermaker, and his samples tend to be more outrightly commercial and graphically appealing than the others.The book is a quick read, you can probably absorb it in about two hours, and well worth it for those interested in how graphic designers work and arrive at solutions. My own favorite part was the brief "killed work" section, where the three designers discuss work of theirs that was rejected and why. I'll definitely try to track down Fresh Dialogue 2, which covers the next year's lecture.