Customer Reviews

Scandinavian Design

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Another one of those excellent Fiell/Taschen overviews on design. This time, a huge 704 page, beautifully designed and printed pictorial collection of the essence of Scandinavian creativity. Although it covers the obvious furniture, metalware, glass, textiles and ceramics it also considers commercial products from companies like Fiskars, Hasselblad, IKEA, Lego, Saab, Volvo and nicely, even a company like Kompan, a producer of childrens playground equipment that is sold worldwide. I think this is one reason for the commercial and creative success of Scandinavian products, they believe that good, simple design should be applied to everything and be available to all, the introduction calls these products democratic objects.

The book is a joy to look at. Each designer (or company with their logo) starts on a spread with a small head shot of the person, some text and the rest of the space, sometimes over several pages, devoted to photos. Interestingly with so many photos (more than 1600) many of which came from various sources, the color values are very similar and they all blend together throughout the book. I think Taschen are to be congratulated on producing (yet again) a stunning looking book that covers the subject so well and anyone involved with craft creativity and design will be pleased to have a copy.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Length:: 0:20 Mins

Right at the start is an introduction to Scandinavian design. Included also is a brief history into each of the countries featured in the book, namely Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. It looks at their design influence and trends.

This is an essentially a catalog book which showcase the many designers and their work. They appear alphabetically in the book. Each designer comes with a brief introduction.

There are hundreds of photos in this hardcover book. While this is a product design book, the focus is specifically on furniture. As such, there are lots of tables, chairs, lamps and indoor decorative objects.

There's a great variety of style to look at, although I can't personally distinguish the design differences between countries. It's a great book, recommended more to interior designers, furniture makers and product designers.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

Ikea would have you believe that legions of brilliant, unknown designers toil tirelessly in arctic sweatshops across Scandinavia to bring you items you didn't even know you wanted. This book is the next best thing to an anxiety attack over swedish meatballs at the local Ikea megastore.

My criticism is that there is little rhyme or reason to the pieces chosen for inclusion. The book just haphazardly marches through: here a chaise lounge, here an end table, here a sconce grafted to a candelabra. If it were better organized with more descriptive text and designer bios including guiding ethos, it would be an excellent introduction to Scandinavian design.