Unit Editions, D&AD Lecture

 

Unit Editions- Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy- D&AD Lecture

Tony came to set up Unit editions after wanting to publish a ‘self indulgent piece’ through Spin – a newspaper format and book on designers reading lists, a 50 greatest’ and after having to make compromises when sending a book that Spin produced called Logo. Adrian became interested in the idea of his own publishing company after getting the book Sampler Series published. It marked ten years of his design studio Intro and was a documentation of album covers at a point in time when the production of imagery and design for these was changing from highly paid well art directed images, to quick turn around mainstream ones. His interest in originating work or working with graphic design through interesting channels spurred him to set up his own publishing company. The pair believe that there is a shortage of good graphic design books and back up their decision to set up a publishing company in the age of the internet as they believe there is still a place for them. Although the internet harbors great information it is often lost when you need to come back to it – they also found that designers like to have books open and next to them as inspiration whilst working on screen and that a book’s physicality needs to be spot on so that you want to handle it and so that its content is not let down.

Unit Editions was set up with no investment, using wordpress to create a simple website and relied on the “natural flow if interest” on the internet for their press release! They blogged and documented the stages of creating the work – images of sending books to print and setting up the studio, created an online dialogue. They asked people to send in images of their own studios for Unit’s first book ‘studio culture’ and had over a hundred sent in. “It was standard marketing but on a much more personal level”- just telling people. Flicker photo streams provided a venue for global interest and ‘Studio Culture’ spurred designers to share their world’s and the design that they love. So pre-orders for Studio Culture were coming out of this whirl of interest.

They talked of the possibilities of a kind of hybrid publishing company- extending a book by republishing parts on the internet when new content is available, or giving away content? Adrian spoke of sites like Flicker as being great for grazing imagery, but that the imagery will always be out of context. He believes that in a digital era designers have become editors in a mass of information. Unit Editions publish monthly ‘papers about design that’s slipped off the radar’. The papers dig a little deeper than the found imagery on the internet and expose obsure areas of design in a more intellectual informed way- “by curating the content, by putting it into a format, suddenly the images have context”. They plan to do a number of explorations in this format.

The pair are interested in forward thinking, fresh faced graphic design that doesn’t look too closely to the past, and feel that graphic design has now reached a point where it is strong enough to stand on its own with no need for a client.