13.11.08
What-o-Mundus?

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Most designers will name a particular book that they keep boomeranging back to, a groundhog day tome that helps them through difficult times or 11th hour deadlines. Only a few weeks ago, British designer Mike Dempsey was sharing one of the books from his collection, ‘Dorfsman on CBS’, name checked only days later by Michael Bierut after Dorfsman’s recent death.

At college, being introduced to Herbert Spencer’s Pioneer’s of Modern Typography was a breakthrough moment for me, as it had been a decade earlier for Peter Saville (although how I ever thought I was going to successfully recycle all those pages of woodblock constructivism with a Grant Enlarger and some Letraset is anyone’s guess).

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I worked with one designer whose copy of this book, The Dictionary of Graphic Images never left his side. Never.

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How creatives use their ‘desert island’ design books varies – for some they just help to unlock frozen minds at critical points. Some great but perhaps overused books like ‘A Smile in the Mind’ can become resources to be mined indiscriminately. Of course, if you’re struggling with a brief on ‘seeing’ then perhaps the spread on ‘eyes’ from the graphic images dictionary will be useful...

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...or the chapter on christmas cards from A Smile in the Mind, but you could argue that all you will be doing is adding (yet another) ‘eye’ solution or ‘rudolf’ gag to the canon rather than thinking of anything particularly original.

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But occasionally, watching what books people return to again and again is far from clichéd and genuinely instructive. I once worked with a very gifted art director in Australia whose typographic touchstone was very unusual. Hidden under his desk, in a special drawer, was a heavily thumbed, torn and ripped copy of Typo Mundus.

Typo Mundus, (or Typo Mundus 20, to give it its full title) was organised by the International Center for the Typographic Art who had an ‘an idea to preserve and document a collection of the most significant typography of the 20th century’. ‘An exhibition was conceived and the call for entries resulted in more than 10000 submissions from all parts of the world. A jury of 12 designers selected some 500 entries for inclusion in the book’.

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Ok, sounds fair enough, so why the fuss? Well, it dates from 1966. That’s one clue. Another clue? The judges, which included Anton Stankowski, Louis Dorfsman, Piet Zwart, Roger Excoffon and Herman Zapf. Blimey. And then there’s the work. It’s hard to think of another book where so much incredible work is so crammed together from typography’s glory period. Here are a few examples, picked pretty much at random.

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logos

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Any designer even remotely interested in big, punchy sixties type should get hold of a copy, as soon as you can. For a book that’s 42 years old, it’s hard to beat, and my Australian colleague had good reason to treat it with such reverence. And yes, he did refer to the work, but he used it to push him to look for better ideas, not just as unknown reference to plunder indiscriminately.

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