The highly ornate, the infinitely rich & the compulsively detailed.

NEW BOOK FORMAT

With a new and expanded book format Graphic 08 goes to war against functionalism.
If ‘ornament is a crime’ as Adolf Loos once declared, then most of those featured in this volume shall plead guilty of attempting to transcend functionality. Function? What for?

The big surprise of Ornate! is the willingness of those featured to engage in practical ways with their environment. Patterns and illustrations are applied to floor and ceiling tiles, wallpapers, interiors and exteriors, furniture, all sorts of objects, textiles, accessories, screensavers, trailers, skateboards, crashed vans…

Ornate! features work from a variety of fields (graphics, illustration, fashion, applied-arts, architecture, graffiti, art & photography…) and an international list of contributors, including: Studio Job, Lucy McLauchlan (Beat 13), Absolute Zero Degrees, Birgit Amadori, Aya Ben Ron, Liselotte Watkins, Tal Rosner, Hanna Werning, Federico Galvani, Giuliano Garonzi, Hjarta Smarta, Yoko Ikeno, Yumiko Kayukawa, Jung Kim, Kiyoshi Kuroda, Manuel Miranda, Mr & Mrs, Linn Olofsdotter, Timorous Beasties, Nice… Also, extended interviews and recent work by Sweden Graphics, Akroe, Kam Tang, Basso & Brooke, Rob Ryan & Florence Manlik.

With an essay by Adrian Shaughnessy and a visual essay by Stefania Malmsten and Paul Davis.

Senselessly ornate, densely decorative, interestingly useless, grossly gothic, obsessively detailed, lavishly allegorical, compulsively complex, absurdly metaphorical, intensely romantic, ludicrously impractical, preposterously obsessive, discreetly excessive, heedlessly minimal – the new graphic will be out in the Autumn of this year.

Editors: Marc-A. Valli (Magma) & Lachlan Blackley
Design: Sebastian Campos (Aficionado), Inca Starzinsky, Samuel Baker
Published by Bis
November 2005
198 pages, 220 X 280 mm


WELCOME TO THE NEW GRAPHIC
MORE PAGES, NO ADS, SAME PRICE!

A few words about the new format.

Yes, Graphic is changing. Evolving would be a nice way to put it, thought it might just be having an identity crisis. In truth, we were never quite able to make up our minds. Were we producing a book (there was definitely enough material in every issue to justify a book) or a magazine (despite the price, and the size and the conspicuous scarcity of advertisers)? What was it? A hybrid? So after much debating we decided to turn it into just that: a hybrid, a strange book-magazine thing – a ‘mook’, as the Japanese call them.