Eye Magazine

Brian Rea’s charming new book, Death Wins a Goldfish (Chronicle Books, £10.99), follows the adventures of Death – cloak and all – through his year-long, forced sabbatical. Combining illustrations with a series of hand-written diary entries, Rea’s book is a funny, thoughtful and light-hearted exploration of the difficulties of work-life balance. Even Death needs a break, sometimes.

Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime (Stanford University Press, $40.00) is a manifesto for the design of technology. Author Ge Wang, an entrepreneur and Stanford University professor, aligns his manifesto to a series of eight rules that encourage designers to ‘design not only from needs – but from the values behind them.’ The most striking aspect of Wang’s book however, is its design, in which text and image are composed in the style of a graphic novel or photo-romance.

Divided alphabetically, and indexed by colour, Scrawl (Rizzoli Books, $39.95) is a survey of ‘sketches, jottings, and notes from the greatest minds in history’ compiled by Caren and Todd Strauss-Schulson, and written by Claudia Strauss-Schulson. This extensive collection was amassed by the authors’ father, David Schulson, and includes the scribbles of figures such as Charlie Chaplin, D.H. Lawrence, Sol Lewitt, and Pablo Neruda. While not always aesthetically pleasing – Allen Ginsberg’s are particularly drab – these doodles allow the reader to establish a connection to these artists otherwise unthinkable.

The third edition of Unidentified Paper Object (Éditions Non Standard, €35.00), a series of themed publications initiated by Élodie Boyer, focuses on the workshops of graphic designer Marion Bataille, and through them, the theme of reading and writing. The publication, which measures between A4 and A3, features a series of workshop outputs – instigated by Bataille but produced by children – alongside a series of texts that investigate ‘what it means to “write one’s name”’ and an envelope of workshop materials, so that each reader may construct their own compositions. (See also Noted no. 74, which includes Earth – Unidentified Paper Object (2016).

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.