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It's a Magazine, It's a Book, It's a Mook

The magazine Make, featured in Design Life Now, bills itself as a “mook,” a hybrid between a book and a magazine. The smallish paperback size recalls Popular Mechanics from the 1950s. The publishers of Make are using the same format concept for their new magazine Craft:.

Why the book format? Nostalgia aside, these bookish little publications feel good in your hands. They also use resources efficiently. Make is not alone. Martha Stewart has a tiny food magazine, and the fashion journals bring out miniature editions of their full-scale issues. These compact little magazines feel more like books.

In the age of blogging and on-line shopping, the book is going strong. Perhaps people are less likely to throw away a book—another eco advantage to the small size. These bookish journals feel more serious and less ephemeral, and they don’t take up much space.

Design within Reach recently sent out a catalogue that compiles a year’s worth of products into a….book. Although I always glance through DWR’s normal-sized direct mail pieces, they ultimately end up in recycling. Not so with the beautifully designed book version. Call it a bookalogue?

It's a Book, It's a Blog, It's a Blook

Recently released is The Word It Book, a collection of visual submissions to the blog Speak Up. “Word It” is one of SpeakUp’s most popular and original features. Each month, a different word is posted on the site, and anyone who so desires can submit a visual/verbal interpretation. (Selections from Word It are on view in Design Life Now: National Design Triennial.) The Word It Book presents some of the editors’ favorite responses to words including oops, green, giant, and parody. (Disclaimer: I wrote the foreword.)

Speak Up has been collecting high-resolution files of all the submissions since the project started, with the idea of a book in mind. But why read a book, when you can go on-line and see all the Word Its there? The book is a curated selection, not a flat database. It uses pacing, scale, and sequence in ways the web site cannot. It has interviews and commentary that bring us inside the brains of some of the creators.

Oh, and it’s a book, and books are still wonderfully seductive objects. Books and blogs are not such strange bedfellows. As a broader cultural phenomenon, blogging is driven primarily by writers, and many writers are using blogs to develop new content for books (and to promote them after the books are published). The Lulu Blooker Prize is given to authors who have created “blooks“—books based on their blogs. Blogging is digital, but it naturally flows towards the world of print.

The Craft of Manufacturing

On April 19, Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey spoke here at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum about their work as owners of the legendary California pottery maker Heath, founded by Edith Heath in the mid-1940s. Their presentation had everyone thinking about the role of craft in manufacturing.

They explain, “We believe that the craft of manufacturing has, to a great extent, been lost as a value in American culture….All facets of our production are executed in our Sausalito factory and blend a mechanized process with hand craftsmanship to obtain the highest quality product….Local manufacturing has social and cultural rewards in bringing local pride to a community, which can’t be said for a service oriented market or a society without a diverse economy.”

Bailey and Petravic talked about how they resist the use of CAD tools at their firm, preferring to work the clay by hand when developing new products. They want each product to express the act of making in a tangible way. They are also committed to socially and environmentally sustainable business practices. Bravo, Heath!

Natalie Jeremijenko is GOOD

Triennial honoree Natalie Jerimijenko is featured on the cover of the current issue of GOOD magazine, the hip new eco/business/culture journal. On GOOD’s web site, you can see a video of Jerimijenko at work in her new Environmental Health Clinic, a floating desk and research station built from recycled soda bottles. Jermijenko reports that you can best experience environmental ills when you are in the environment. Her raft, she says, is the best office in Manhattan.

But is it craft?

The makers of Make, the techie-geek D.I.Y. magazine featured in the Triennial, have a new publication out, now in its third issue, called Craft:. This hip and beautiful little zine got me thinking about the craft revolution, which has reinvigorated the lives of design professionals as well as the lives of a vast and passionate general public.

Magazines like Make, Craft:, and Readymade show people how to make things, but how much can they really convey about craft itself? True craft represents an embodied, lived skill, grounded in the person of the maker, that is acquired over a long period of time. All design activities demand this embodied experience. Even digital processes like writing code or editing images in Photoshop are craft-based skills. You can learn about them from a book or a tutorial, but ultimately, you have to try them, and try them again and again.

As a college-level design educator, I know that each time I follow students through the process of conceiving and producing a work of design, I’m helping them develop their craft. It’s an incremental task, however, and craft is one area where older people have an advantage over the young, because this embodied experience takes years to acquire. (The challenge for us is to keep up with tools that keep changing.)

I’ve come to realize that writing is a craft, too, no different at bottom from the crafts of cooking or sewing or typography. With experience, one learns that crafting a sentence will take a certain amount of time and effort. One can be hit with inspiration or insight (that part is art), but making it all work and flow and communicate requires working and reworking (that part is craft).