Customer Reviews

Life Style

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Working as a management consultant I'm often turned off by the staleness of much of the current management literature. The design community is a much more sensitive antenna as to what is happening in the world today.

Bruce Mau's Life Style is an imaginative survey of how the world is being transformed under the inexorable impetus of global capitalism. It is not a dispassionate account: basically Mau is trying to show us how he is dealing with a very fundamental existential dilemma. Because, as a successful designer, Mau is part of the system - developing and spreading the lingua franca of a global economy. At the same time he is rebelling against the pervasive homogenisation of our image culture: "We should not forget that the com after the dot is short for commercial. Must we define every gesture and possibility within this envelope? Is it not our role to imagine new futures more rich and complex and wild in their style than any single framework can accomodate?"

Yhe book is a captivating mix of artwork and short insightful essays. Sanford Kwinter's introductory three-page essay alone is worth the price of the book. I gather this book will be very influential in the years to come.

Here's the thing: Bruce Mau is a very good designer. His office turns out a lot of very refined objects, this monograph included. That said, this book is probably twice as big as it ought to be. It seems to me as though BMD wants to be more like OMA; "S,M,L,XL" was one of the best architectural books ever, and its heft reinforced the work being shown within it. "Life Style" is just big for the sake of being big. Well, as well as being self-indulgent. Because graphic designers are not asked to be deep thinkers, and most of their attempts at same do not fare very well. Bruce Mau really wants to be considered as an equal to the deep thinkers, and he just isn't. He's just a (very) good designer.

Buy it anyway. It's got too much good work inside to ignore, but keep some salt handy.

(p.s. indigo.ca was allowing people to choose their cover; they may still be doing that)

The Bruce Mau Life Style clearly intends to brand the man behind the firm, thought the work is a corporate product. The Romantic artis-genius may be dead, but the irony of the book is its insistence on Bruce Mau as just that.

The inspirational tome (or semi-manifesto) is a beautiful object on par with the Tolleson book (Soak Wash Rinse Spin) and leagues beyond Cahan's I Am Almost Always Hungry.

In all, this is an overhyped, well-made product, worth seeing/having as an object of production.

I received this book as a present from a friend, and must admit that it was the most special gift I have received in a long time. I have long been fascinated with Bruce Mau's ideas, and this book brings the ideas and implimentation of ideas together very elegantly. The insights into "How it works" are essential material for anyone with ambitions of setting new standards in design.

Whenever you may have thought of the world as image, as customer economy, as something that you probably may have to digest visually, this is the book which will give you an idea of the weight of the image.
We're exposed and there's no shelter. If we want to survive sanely, we better learn to differentiate between the sublime and the ridiculous.
What BMD does, is serious. They know what they're doing and, most probably, they are among the very best in visual/conceptual design in the world. This book is a huge pleasure to go through, just peeping at the pages. But then, once you start reading, it becomes clear that this is not Disney or any sort of escapism - rather, it's anti-consumer, in the sense that the text URGES you to reconsider your comfortable stance of the by-looker and go out and get real about the stuff that goes into your head by way of your eyes.
We have to become active in creating a more responsible graphic/architectural/sensual surrounding; otherwise we'll all be homoequals soon.
Thank you, Bruce - and team, of course, for an insightful tome of words and pictures and simply great design which I'll never forget.

the length of this book serves a purpose: it allows the unfolding story of mau's practice to have a leisurely and comfortable pace and it draws the reader in and takes him/her on a journey. i'm no graphic designer (an architect) but i was never bored and learned a lot about the field and about how mau's office works. probably more useful to me than the koolhaas/mau book (s,m,l,xl) because it was on a topic outside my normal frame of reference and really got me thinking and - best of all - generating ideas for myself.

This is interesting, in the sense that Bruce Mau has a very conscious and intelectual approach to design. It's not too technical, and he provides a very readable and understandable explanation to his approach, which also reaches beyond just design issues, but more of the state of civilization in the 21st century. And of course, this book itself reflects his ideas of design, so you literary see what you read. Too bad you can't carry this book around...

One thing. On my visit to a design book store, I realized that this book has several versions of cover. One is light blue, but there are atleast beige, red, pink, black, and also there seems to be variations in the pattern. The contents are all the same, and I don't know if there's any way of specifying the ones that you want, but it'll be better if you can.

A truly beautiful, insightful and precisely engineered tomb of graphic design and contemporary society. Pick it up (if you can lift it) and prepare to be delighted with stories, essays and quips about the life of Bruce Mau and the life of graphics.

This is a good example of a well marketed product. It seem like every "modern" person got to have his copy of this book, called sometimes "the bible of style". I think is more a "pastiche" of interesting things, sometimes good things, but pointless and looong. And my version (uk) is so bad printed it makes me wonder for what have I paid 40 pounds on it.
Just like the other "S,M,L,XL" with the also overrated work of the overrated "modern" architect Rem Koolhaas, this is just a beautiful object. But hey, I wanted a book!