Customer Reviews

Pentagram: The Compendium

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If you are interested in design of any kind, you should read this book. This book tells everything there is to know about Pentagram up til 1993. It's a huge book and its packed full of information & pictures. The partners of Pentagram actually wrote it so it is from their perspective of the firm. This is definitely worth the read!!!

If you are at all a Pentagram fan, this is a must have. It is chock full of Pentagram's designs, writings and even comments from the team themselves. For me, it is a great book of inspiration to have in your collection. First published in 1993, and reprinted in 1998, it still stands up today. It is a permanent resident on my coffee table and a perfect companion to the book 'Pentagram Marks'.

Pentagram's Compendium is, as far as I'm concerned, not a very exciting book. There is a sense of déjà vu all over the place. There are some happy exceptions, but generally it's the kind of design that has been around for at least 10 years. There is a lot which is clever, witty and beautiful in the conventional sense, but all too often the design collapses under its own weight. There is so little excitement! Compare this to Bruce Mau's Life Style which is an achievement in a different league. I think Mau has his finger on the pulse of our age. He wrestles heroically with the contradictions and paradoxes of his work and his book vibrates with these worries and tensions. The Pentagram book is much more suave. This is not surprising given that the collective was founded in the early seventies by a bunch of 30-plus designers. The most interesting aspect of their approach has nothing to do with their design: it's their loosely coupled organisation with seventeen partners working in three different cities that has managed to thrive over three decades. I assume that many of the corporate dinosaurs of today will continue to call on Pentagram's undoubtedly solid design expertise. But the vicissitudes of the cybereconomy demand a more vicious, tormented and volatile kind of design. For that I would revert to Mau.