Book Review: Dirty Fingernails

All you designers-turned-printmakers and printmakers-turned-designers should pay attention to this one. The good people at Rockport Publishers were kind enough send us a review copy of their 2009 release, Dirty Fingernails: A One-of-a-Kind Collection of Graphics Uniquely Designed by Hand by John Foster. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a survey of artist/designers working with “old” media to arrive at interesting (and commercially viable) results. While the book doesn’t focus on printmaking specifically, it is about the current embrace of the human hand in design and by default, plenty of hand-printing is included.

Lots of Printeresting favorites are featured in the book… The Little Friends of Printmaking, The Small Stakes, Ellen Lupton, Tyler Stout, The Decoder Ring Design Concern, and Yokoland to name a handful. Rather than delving deep into the psychology of The Hand-Made with essays, Foster gives us a quick intro about the importance of tactile experience and then let’s the work do the talking. Each piece featured in the book is accompanied by an insightful paragraph or two of exposition explaining the what why, and how.

Can’t go wrong with a Boston by Little Friends.

The book is broken up into five chapters: Typography for the People, These Hands Were Made for Drawing, When Each Piece Needs Your Magic Touch, Puzzle Pieces, and Kicking It Old School and each chapter starts with a brief summary of its guiding principle. Foster makes the case though his editorial choices that while the computer is a valuable tool, in a world full of digital homogeneity one way to stand out is to allow your hand to be part of the conversation. We couldn’t agree more.

Some Decoder Ring and BankerWessel.

This looks familiar.Stefan Sagmeister… designing with bananas.

Choosing work for the book must have been a blast- no doubt with the size constraints a lot of good stuff didn’t make it into the final edit. The book’s subject, analog approaches to design, is incredibly broad. No one volume could cover it in its entirety but Foster does a good job of summarizing the current state of hand-made design from his point of view. This is a decent book on any number of levels: a nice source of inspiration in the studio or classroom but good for a coffee table, too.

Jason Munn of The Small Stakes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to go and cut a rubylith stencil.