Summer 2024
Digging deep into the plan chest
North: Extracts from Visual Identities
Designed by North. Unit Editions, 2024, £60
Design studio North have always shrouded themselves in mystery. For a long time, their online presence consisted of nothing but an anonymous email address set against an unforgiving grey background. While the much admired group has now opened up a little, their long-awaited monograph, North: Extracts from Visual Identities, released to mark the studio’s 30th anniversary next year, sees them digging through the plan chest in more depth than ever before.
The latest publication from Unit Editions (now a Thames & Hudson imprint), Extracts continues the publisher’s rich lineage of highly collectable, design-led monographs, presenting 308 pages of graphic vignettes that cover the fabled studio’s output since it was founded in 1995. Designed by North, the book is an unassuming case-bound hardback, unremarkable in appearance but for its striking yellow book cloth. It has an appropriate weightiness to it given the occasion of its publication.
Yet this is in no way a typical monograph. It has no captions and no descriptive texts. Instead, North have let the work ‘speak for itself’. Its pages are populated with visual material: logos, colours, photography, posters and packaging are all arranged with the kind of panache that has won the studio such a devoted following. Projects flow into one another, conversing but never clashing. It is engaging and dynamic and surprising, and works thanks to North’s impressive portfolio of high-quality projects. Work for the RAC, Opera North, and Yauatcha is afforded a new lease of life alongside more recent projects for the Southbank Centre, ACMI and Factory International. That said, nothing here is old: new photography combines with exactingly reproduced artwork to tie three decades of work into a strikingly coherent whole …
Daniel Shannon designer, writer, London
Read the full version in Eye no. 106 vol. 27, 2024
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published 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.