The User Group Network presents the picks of the best for your user group members. As an Amazon Books Associate when you purchase here, you'll be helping support your user group community! Jules Siegel reviews: Hot California Graphics Alan Fletcher, Editor Thirty-seven graphic designers located in California strut and prance in this lavishly printed coffee table portfolio. If you did not know that they were selected by the editor and did not have to pay any fees or promotional considerations, it would be easy to suspect that this book might be some kind of vanity press publication. ___ According to the publisher, the designers were given a layout grid to follow, but they wrote their own introductory copy and selected all the images. Since Madison Square Press and editor Alan Fletcher are based in New York, the result reflects the Eastern mass media view of California design rather than any real local vision. Although the designers are Californian, they seem to be posing for some invisible corporate marketing department in New York or Chicago. ___ This is especially painful in the portfolio of Mike Salisbury, who has been one of California's leading graphic designers since the '60s, when he was art director of West, the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine. No one was more important than Salisbury in the development of uniquely Californian visual design, except, possibly, the late Howard Gossage, the San Francisco advertising genius whose taste inspired Jann Wenner, the Diggers and other revolutionary '60s communicators such as the legendary Peter Coyote. ___ Salisbury, who also worked closely with Francis Ford Coppola and other Hollywood cinema greats, created an essentially California look using brilliant (and often very far-out) local photographers and illustrators. In Hot California Graphics, he shows none of this. It's all big names -- Levi's, Hasbro, Jurassic Park -- with heavy-handed captions boasting of sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. ___ A photograph of his packaging design for Bubble Yum is justified by a 19-digit sales figure that includes three decimal places. This, presumably is supposed to be a joke, as it isn't possible to sell ".701 bubbles yearly." It might be worth a chuckle, except that the Bubble Yum design is a grotesque example of cheapo supermarket slush. ___ The other designers mostly show various computer graphics cliches: logos with interlocking crescents (a metaphor repeated at least eight zillion times) with Futura-Helvetica-generic sans serif typography, pathetic imitations of childish handwriting, pseudo-Oriental calligraphy, retro '50s photographs and illustrations that look as if they were swiped from something like "Clip Art Madness--750,000 royalty-free images you can use today!" Reviewer: * Jules Siegel Title: Author: * Alan Fletcher, Editor Reader Level: * Beginner: just getting started Ranking: * * TWO stars: okay, in lieu of anything else * Adobe Bookshelf 20 to 40% off Adobe Books * SUBSCRIBE When you purchase by clicking on links, you get good discounts, you help the user group community! Show Us Your Newsletter ! Get the News Resource Manager Shareware Manager Rumor Manager Review a Book Get a Book ___ The advanced functions of the leading computer graphics programs are such big stars in this book that they deserve their own credits. There are endlessly complicated collages, Photoshop plug-ins, fractal paint tricks imitating Russian "machine" art and other once-esoteric poster styles, lots of type fitted to curved paths, three-dimensional lighting effects, and the ubiquitous Gaussian blur drop shadow. Before the invention of the computer, these techniques would have kept armies of airbrush artists working 24/7. Today, you just pop them out of the can. ___ Despite this, these are very competent and professional corporate designers, but they seem to be lost somewhere in the Museum of Modern Art. Their designs are mostly based on Mondrian, Klee, Matisse, Picasso and Leger, with the more advanced drawing their inspiration from Dali, Magritte and Escher. The flamboyant world of online art has gone way beyond that. The hottest graphic design is in games, skins and animations for the web. Conventional graphic designers work on Macintoshes. ___ Today, the drooling edge is in massively powerful equipment such as Silicon Graphics used in advanced three-dimensional rendering. Pentiums running Windows NT are the newly favored platform because they provide the most raw power per dollar. Teenagers want games. The PC is their electric guitar. Sadly, there's little silicon in Hot California Graphics except in the form of packaging for computer games and a bit of Web interface design. ___ Are they even aware of Myst as a visual object? This game, which was marketed by Broderbund, a San Rafael company since absorbed by Mattel, revolutionized the industry, is Pacific Northwest at the core -- the evergreen forests, the nostalgia. It goes beyond the forest scenes in Snow White, which were inspired by Brewer State Park in Big Sur. The haunting image of an antique time-stained space rocket brought a new kind of romance to gaming. ___ Romance has never been a predominant feature of corporate graphic design. Today, judging by this book, even tattoo artists, doctors and chiropractors must have logos that look slicker than the CBS eye or the NBC peacock. Meanwhile, companies such as Gerber's are showing how organic they are by using scratchy rustic script and wheat stalks and other metaphors that resemble a cross between the Old Farmer's Almanac and the Renaissance Faire. ___ Hot California Graphics does exactly what corporate graphic design is supposed to do: project an inoffensive but visually arresting image of competence and importance. If it had been titled Cold California Graphics, there would be no reason to complain. Hot California Graphics by Alan Fletcher, Editor * Audience: The book's audience is design professionals, any platform. * Reader Level: Beginner: just getting started * * Ranking: TWO stars: okay, in lieu of anything else Jules Siegel is a writer and graphic designer whose work is in the Artists Books collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Read more about him at http://www.cafecancun.com/jsiegel.htm EDITORS: Permission required to reprint this article, some restrictions may apply. 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