Eye Magazine online has a nice critique by Rick Poynor about Chip Kidd's novel "The Cheese Monkeys".

This was a terrific, fun novel - especially if you are a graphic designer who went to art school. I wrote a review about it for Amazon right after I read it and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be entertained for an afternoon.

Comments

Hi Erin,

Actually, as you can see, I do look at design blogs -- and I enjoy a lot of what I read. Feels very fresh. In fact, I suggested writing a column on them for Print, but they already had Joe Clark's piece in the pipeline. I've always been struck by how sharp designers' critiques of each other's work can be in private, for instance when judging prizes, but how rare it is for this informed commentary on actual design to make it into print. Blogs are a more public extension of this process. On the other hand, I'm not suggesting that it should be the exclusive job of designers to provide their own critiques. I do think the sign of a mature criticism, as in other fields, would be the existence of "design criticism" as an adjacent, but separate, field of activity. We don't expect film-makers or novelists to be critics of their field (though sometimes they are) and I've always felt that being a practitioner puts definite limits on what can be said precisely because the designer is "on the inside". That's why some of the highly promising designer/critics of the early 1990s have retreated somewhat over time.

Regards,

Rick Poynor