This piece will appear in the forthcoming June 2007 issue of 2+3D, in Polish translation, with an English summary. The book in question, Influences, is available here.

When Anna Gerber and Anja Lutz, of Shift!, presented Influences at a lecture at RISD last year, they focused on the unique database application they had concocted¹. At first brush, Influences wasn’t even a book, it was a wiki-esque compendium of design-oriented footnotes and citations. The content they went through ranged from the personal anecdotes of A- and B-list designers², to somewhat more rigorous explications³. Practicing designers, artists, and others who personally knew Anna and Anja had been doled out login credentials to their database, where they could expound on any design-related topic that they chose.

I was convinced that Influences was a website until halfway through the presentation, when Anna and Anja revealed that they had commissioned a tool that could transform the content of the entire database into an InDesign file, rendering a print version of the sites’ dynamic content with the click of a button. This, they described, was how they would produce Influences, the book, as the output of the database “would provide an excellent starting point” for such a project.

What they did not show was how the elaborate cross-linking of the all the database entries would be handled, but I assumed they would come up with a wonderful and marvelous typographic footnoting system, or some such thing. To me, this was the exciting kernel of such an ambitious project. How would such renowned and intelligent designers manage to condense and distill the dynamic power of a modern database system into a book?

How, indeed. Upon first perusing Influences in its final form, I was dismayed to see that nearly every page looked like the raw output of the transformation program Anna and Anja had demonstrated. It's a straightforward two-column layout, with room at the top for thumbnail images. Leafing through, I found only eight or so spreads within the 268-page primary “lexicon” that broke away from this format.

That would be fine, really, if the information in the book was of any use. It’s hard, I will grant, to translate hypertextual information into a legible print system⁴. But Influences fails at the task.

Terms that refer to other terms within Influences are underlined, and preceded with an arrow symbol (→). This makes →most of the text very →difficult to →scan, as you →might →imagine. Furthermore, the actual location of the referent information itself is left as an exercise to the reader; the links tell you to go elsewhere, but they don't tell you specifically where. (The book is alphabetized, which I suppose eases this kind of ad-hoc navigation.)

The linked items themselves are hardly consistent, as well. Consider an entry such as the one for “Grid Systems in Graphic Design”, on page 105. This entry contains seven link callouts, three of which are within a quote. The quotee in this case, one Nik Thoenen, is not himself an Influences referent, so neophyte designers such as myself have to look this Nik person up the old-fashioned way, using reference systems outside of Influences, like Google or Nexis⁵.

This leads me to wonder: is the whole thing a big in-joke? Only friends of the authors could contribute to the database, and the whole thing is impossible to even view online, at the time of writing. In fact, I only know about Influences’ data backend because I attended the lecture. Not only does the book fail to explain this rather critical aspect of its authorship in any way, it explains nothing about itself whatsoever. There is no introduction, no foreword, no “how to use this book” type thing. We are only offered some maddeningly vague, self-congratulatory bullshit that appears in the endpapers:

“Who’s Who” style books are quite the rage throughout most design disciplines. Alice Twemlow put one out last summer⁶ after surveying a broad range of contemporary practitioners. Phaidon has given us their mammoth Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture⁷, and the AIGA regularly pumps out annuals and compendiums that are equally at home on a designer’s shelf or a coffeetable in a Wallpaper* photoshoot. It is therefore hard to understand why Anna and Anja would painstakingly create a system that could set their work apart from the others — their database — and then subsequently use it so poorly. Perhaps they will eventually release the fruits of their contributors’ labors to the public, and create a resource that is truly “cumulative, but always in flux”, as the endpapers say. Until then, Influences will likely suffer a fate similar to Life Style⁸: largely unread by those who conspicuously display it on their bookshelves.

Footnotes:
1. Or, more likely, one that they had commissioned from a technically-minded subordinate. [back]

2. See the entries for “book reviews” and “grandmother” in Influences, on pages 33 and 102, respectively, for examples of this sort of thing. [back]

3. See “internal structures” in Influences, on page 122 (although as with content from Wikipedia and such sources, the veracity and rigor is debatable.) [back]

4. God knows, many have tried, including myself. In my own work, when I had to cite URLs, I used a special footnote symbol, with its own color, to denote a URL. I then listed the URL itself in the margin, and I reproduced a URL index at the end of the book, for maximum clarity.

... To be sure, that’s not the only way to do it. My goal was to give the reader the most information on the cite without disrupting the flow. [back]

5. As far as I could divine, Influences does not include any sort of system for citing references outside of itself. [back]

6. Twemlow, Alice: What is Graphic Design For? Rotovision SA, 2006. [back]

7. Phaidon Press (Editors): The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Phaidon, 2005. [back]

8. Mau, Bruce (Editor): Life Style. Phaidon, 2000. See previous WDC article here. [back]