Draw Down Books

The Birth of a Style: The Influence of the Basel Educational Model on Swiss Graphic Design

By Dorthea Hofmann

Designed by Matthias Hofmann

Published by Triest Verlag, 2024

Softcover with flaps, 472 pages, ca. 400 color and b&w images, 7.5 × 9.8 inches

We don't just make books, we make bookends too!

Durable powder-coated steel construction (made in the USA), and a classic L-shape form designed to keep your books in place. 5.5 in. × 5.25 in. One piece. Designed by Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda

Space as Language: The Properties of Typographic Space

This publication, part of the Cambridge Elements: Publishing and Book Culture series, examines the function and significance of typographic space. Readers are invited to consider in turn the space within letters, the space between letters, the space between lines, and the margin space surrounding the text-block, to develop the hypothesis that viewed collectively these constitute a 'metalanguage' complementary to the text.

Harber Type Specimen (A2 version) by Benoît Bodhuin

Harber is a dot matrix design with variable axes for weight, slant, volume, noise, and optical size.

Published by Benoît Bodhuin, 2023

1 double-sided sheet, 5-color Risograph, 16.5 × 23.4 inches Ships folded, dimensions 8.3 × 11.7 inches

A Line Which Forms a Volume 4

On sale! A Line Which Forms a Volume 4 comes to you from the London College of Communication where students in the MA Graphic Media Design program put together ALWFV on a regular basis. Issue 4 focuses on the constructed borders of the design canon. How do design practices move and cross borders? Contributors include Ahmed Ansari, Clara Balaguer, Yu Jiwon, Lucas LaRochelle, and more. Designed by Yao Qi and Zhu Yiting.

Means of Production: Indigenous Patterns, Forms, and Letters Join Fillip and design educators Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda (nłeʔképmx) of Draw Down Books on Saturday, January 27, for a typography workshop presented in collaboration with the Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Just arrived from Europe! Slanted's Yearbook of Lettering

Letters and typefaces not only transport information, but create a feeling or have a personality. Lettering takes this even a step further: with its movement, artistic strokes, and variety, it has the potential to radiate a whole range of energies, telling stories of harmony and distortion about positive and negative space. Words become drawings and pictures themselves.

For almost 50 years, Brazilian-born New York–based artist Lydia Okumura (b. 1948), like her contemporaries Dorothea Rockburne and Robert Irwin, has explored the realm of geometric abstraction by challenging our perception of space in her sculptures, installations, and works on paper. In the 1970s, as a young artist in her native São Paulo, she was introduced to Conceptual art, Minimalism, Land Art, and Arte Povera through the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techou. These movements, along with Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism, influenced Okumura’s dynamic work in which she uses simple materials such as string, glass and paint to balance line, plane and shadow.

This book is incredible! Seeing <—> Making: Room for Thought is an image-packed deep dive into McLuhan and Benjamin, a collaboration between philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, Adam Michaels, and Kevin McCaughey of Boot Boyz Biz. The volume makes theory visible in a captivating way, and traverses history, politics and aesthetics as well as visual culture. Shipping now!

52 stories on type, typography, and graphic design. A fascinating journey through the world of typography.

Every day something is happening in the world of typography and graphic design – something new is being created in Buenos Aires, Paris, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Seoul or Melbourne.

For this volume, the most inspiring, trend-setting, and enduring stories, events, and works have been collected together: 52 entries for 52 weeks, written by more than 40 experts.

Shop our annual sale and find gems like this rare FIRST ISSUE of SOFA!

SOFA was a magazine that uncovered and defined its present and looked into the near future by exploring one tantalizing, terrifying, tantamount, or taboo topic per issue while sitting on international sofas with the day's most interesting people. The first issue dove into the minds of Generation Z by giving the floor to a diverse group of international teenagers.

The definitive visual history of the spaceships, alien landscapes, cryptozoology, and imagined industrial machinery of 1970s paperback sci-fi art and the artists who created these extraordinary images. Designed by Eli Mock, published by Abrams Books, 2023.

Learn more at Draw Down!

Diagramming Modernity: Books and Graphic Design in Latin America, 1920–1940 This massive publication offers the first comprehensive panorama of the Latin American illustrated book between the 1920s and 1940s, a period characterized by the region's rapid modernization. The books reproduced here encapsulate this transformative era, expressing and embodying emergent national and continental narratives in Latin American countries.

Graduation 2020 Design Academy Eindhoven

Published by the Design Academy Eindhoven on the occasion of its 2020 graduation show, this catalog is an example of what has been referred to as the extreme present. At once intimidating and intoxicating, it is built around a reality that was in a state of accelerated flux. The catalog's relevance depended on the ability to uninterruptedly interpret this evolving reality.

Who the Hell is Müller-Brockmann?

What are the underlying reasons for the success or failure of a design manifesto? How can cultural exchange bring new value to the field of graphic design? At the end of the day is the contemporary scene still truly innovative or simply basking in past glories?

Over the course of a residency at a London gallery, Swiss designer Demian Conrad invited an array of graphic designers and typographers past and present to share the anecdotes, stories and scandals that have marked the international design scene over the course of the last century. The result is Who the Hell is Müller-Brockmann? an examination of the ways in which the Swiss Style influenced British graphic design and vice versa.

A5/02 Philips – Twen: Realism is the Score

Between 1961 and 1968, the magazine Twen produced a series of LP recordings in collaboration with the Philips record label. During this period, all editions of Twen were accompanied by LPs drawn from the realms of jazz, classical music, radio plays, world music, or pop. For the designs of his record covers, art director Willy Fleckhaus used Concrete Art by Karl Gerstner, Max Bill, and other dedicated graphic designers such as Heinz Edelmann and Günther Kieser. This now-forgotten series, comprising around 70 discs, is a masterful instance of the conjunction of music and graphic design. In collaboration with music archives and private collections, this rare series is reunited in its entirety and documented in this publication.

Kris Sowersby: The Art of Letters is a visual feast of letterforms celebrating one of the world’s leading type designers. The 800 page publication examines Sowersby’s letter drawing practice while considering the characters as independent works of art, exploring their interconnections of function and style. It champions the absurd beauty involved in creating multiple expressions of predetermined alphabets through nuance and theory.