Customer Reviews

Marc Newson

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You've heard all the superlatives, and mostly, they're true: the bar-, glass-, plane-, car-, bike-, chair-, watch-, pod-designing Newson *is* all that and two bags of chips. You'd have to go back to greats like Raymond Loewy or Norman Bel Geddes to find someone who has so unerringly worked out a design vocabulary in so many different realms, and he's done it all by his late 30's. The problem is that he's still waiting for someone to come along and attempt to challenge that vocabulary in print - prise it apart and see what makes it tick.

This book, very unfortunately, is not that. What it is, is an extremely pretty and overpackaged walkthrough of his major work, and as such it's a joy to leaf through - good to have simply for putting all these projects together in one place. The real upside of this is that it enables the casual fan to see for the first time the seamless and almost-obsessive way Newson uses form: the same shape, here a chair, there a doorstop.

We'll be wrestling with Marc's work for the next forty years, so there's still time, but I had expected more from this book.

As Australia's most influential designer, Marc Newson has come along way from humble beginnings in Sydney. Shy and unassuming, Marc is a creative force at work. As a design addict of Marc's industrial design, the book serves as an almost complete catalogue of his works up to its publication. It opens up a new avenue to track down manufacturers and collect objects and furniture, so in that respect it is a useful reference.

The book, like Marc's work, is slick and enticing. The slip-case is gorgeous, designed by Marc, and the glossy pages beautifully put together.

If, like me, you are a die-hard Newson fan, you will have this book already ... but for all those people who are new to Marc's work and contemplating purchasing this book (having read all the other amazon.com reviews about how it lacks substance) like Wallpaper* magazine it's a beautifully bound publication that just, frankly, looks fantastic.

If you only casually follow his career you've seen all this work before. There are no real insights into his process, just a bunch of glossy computer renderings done in Form-Z with no depth. Go to a library and look for back issues of DOMUS magazine. They've done much more in depth articles on Newson's work. This book is a marketing brochure.

It's about time a designer has captured my attention like some of the great designers of the past. I think Marc is one of the few true futurist. By far one of the best modern day designers of our time. He is one of those designers that has made his ideas available to a wide range of people by producing for companies such as Alessi to B&B. This book is a great collection of his work, it's on my coffee table by itself, it deserves to be. People stock up, Marc Newson is a name you will hear more and more.