Unit Editions

What is Universal Everything? — Available for Pre-order

29 March 2019 in Books Comment

Available for pre-order now.

Editors: Adrian Shaughnessy, Tony Brook
Essays: Adrian Shaughnessy, Antonia Lee
Design: Spin

Edition of 2000 – unique ‘tipped-in’ image on each cover

Matt Pyke, founder and creative director of Universal Everything, calls his studio a “digital art and design collective”. And after 15 years of revolutionary work in the digital realm, UE has its first book – What is Universal Everything?

Working closely with Pyke, the Spin design team of Tony Brook and Claudia Klat have designed a book that successfully brings Universal Everything’s vivid on-screen work to the printed page. The book is printed using a unique salmon pink fluoro colour that has been specially created and mixed for the project.

What is Universal Everything? examines 24 of the studio’s most exciting projects, from work for clients such as Microsoft, Hyundai and MTV, through to projects for Radiohead and the Science Museum in London. For each piece of work, Pyke collaborates with a pool of international creative talent from his base in Sheffield in the north of England.

The book also focuses on several of UE’s self-initiated projects that keep the studio pushing forward. These speculative explorations, says Pyke, are concerned with “trying to invent the future before we get there”.

The book also includes two essays and extensive interviews throughout, 90 pages of Pyke’s hand-drawn sketches, as well as detailed listings of the studio’s numerous sources of inspiration – from music to literature; from places to food.

In keeping with the book’s high production values, nearly all the work featured in the book has been re-rendered at high res, allowing the full majesty of Universal Everything’s screen-based work to be captured on the printed page.

Furthermore, every cover of What is Universal Everything? is unique: a different tipped-in image graces the cover of each edition. As Pyke notes: “We developed software to generate random combinations of shapes, colours and sizes with collision detection. Thousands of unique graphic compositions have been generated…. Everyone will own a one-off.”

About UE

“The company creates gorgeous visual spectacles on screen that, while they will never be attained in physical reality, reinterpret the nuances of natural human motion and seem to have a soul, a heartbeat, and the breath of life.”
The Creators Project, Vice

“Universal Everything proves how effective a flexible, collaboration-based agency model can be to deliver awe-inspiring projects on a global scale.”
Creative Bloq

“The studio’s desire to uncover new forms and aesthetic ideas produces profound experiences; often blurring the line between the art world and the commercial world of brands… as digital artists, their output is ahead of the rest.”
Highsnobiety

“Artists love to portray technology as the villain, as a force for evil that makes short work of our humanity… Matt Pyke isn’t one of them. The artist – who, it should be noted, works out of a log cabin in Sheffield, England – is an unabashed techno-optimist.”
Fast Company

Size: 240mm × 338mm
Pages: 384 (plus 4pp cover)
Format: Hardback, black foil-blocked type on cover
Printing: Litho
Colours: CYK + one special
Special colour: Salmon fluoro (THSX0339 Unit Ed. – Universal Fluoro Red
Inks: Toyo Ink LED-UV
Cover image: 2,000 unique tipped-in images; high gloss lamination
Colours: CYK + one special
Typeface(s): GT Cinetype by Grilli type
Printer: GöteborgsTryckeriet, Mölndal

Unit Editions

Karlssonwilker On America

21 September 2018 in Books Comment

Karlssonwilker On America
Authors/designers: Karlssonwilker
Editor: Mark Sinclair

Edition of 1000

New York-based design studio Karlssonwilker take on ‘America’ in the debut issue of ON, Unit’s new print platform where designers examine a single subject.

For ON #1, Karlssonwilker examine their adopted home of America in their own inimitable style. As outsiders who have been working in the US for 18 years, Jan Wilker and Hjalti Karlsson – German and Icelandic, respectively – offer up “a compilation of our thoughts and observations on our surroundings and encounters throughout our years in New York”.

The result is a heady mixture of graphics, illustration and photography; charts, diagrams, (definitely not fake) facts and wry observations, centred around an extensive Q&A between Wilker and Unit’s Adrian Shaughnessy.

From thoughts on “design as entertainment” to discussing the challenges of running a design studio in the city that never sleeps, the interview sees Wilker recount his first, eventful 24-hours in New York City in 1999 and frames the studio’s recent move to Ridgewood, Queens after 16 years in Manhattan.

“Over time, we have been slowly digested, and the edges of our hesitation and European arrogance softened away, to be replaced by something American that we now treat as if it had always been part of us.” Karlssonwilker

The ON series

A new range of Unit titles that gives designers the chance to explore unusual and unexpected subjects. Intended as a lo-fi, carte blanche platform, ON will see a wide range of designers and art directors investigating topics that excite and inspire them.

Specifications

Conceived, written and designed by Karlssonwilker
Size: A4
Pages: 52
Colour: Mono Binding: Staple Bound
ISBN: 978-1-9164573-2-4

Unit Editions

VNIITE: Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design

31 August 2018 in Books Comment

VNIITE: Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design

Authors: Alexandra Sankova and Olga Druzhinina
Editor: Mark Sinclair
Design: Spin

Edition of 2000

We are delighted to announce that VNIITE – Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design is now available to pre-order. Written by the Moscow Design Museum’s Alexandra Sankova and Olga Druzhinina, the book tells the previously untold story of the VNIITE – the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics.

Formed in Soviet Russia in 1962, by the design visionary Yuri Soloviev, this vast network contained Moscow’s most progressive designers. The ‘Vniitians’, as they were called, designed for the future and developed new theories and approaches to design in the USSR.

But more than ﬁfty years later, the organisation is all but forgotten. It’s hard to fathom how such an institution, dedicated to the promotion of utopian design, in theory and in practice, and the improvement of design standards within the Soviet Union, could have faded so far from view. After the disintegration of the USSR, the VNIITE and its library of images and prototypes were presumed lost.

Until now, that is. Thanks to the efforts of the Moscow Design Museum – and the discovery of the personal archives of some of the VNIITE designers – the story of this remarkable organisation is being pieced back together.

Alongside images of sketches, models and prototypes, the book also includes a selection of covers of one of the USSR’s hidden gems of graphic design – the VNIITE’s monthly journal, Technical Aesthetics. Showcased together for the first time, these covers chart Soviet graphic trends from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

In the pages of this book you can see some of the more compelling examples of utopian Soviet design. As the designer Paula Scher notes, the work offers a balance between ‘the communist desire for a perfectly-designed world against the real world of human competitiveness and inequality’.

Size: 240mm×170mm
Pages: 224
Print: Four colour litho
Cover: Foiled
ISBN: 978-1-9164573-0-0

Unit Editions

Vaughan Oliver: Archive

24 August 2018 in Books Comment

Vaughan Oliver: Archive – now available to pre-order
Editors: Tony Brook & Adrian Shaughnessy
Design: Spin

Edition of 900

Book

Thanks to the generosity of the nearly 1000 people who backed our Kickstarter campaign to publish the two-volume set ‘Vaughan Oliver: Archive’, we are able to print a few hundred additional copies of this important publication.

Both volumes (they come in a slipcase) offer a celebration of the Vaughan Oliver archive, a treasure house of graphic delights. Oliver is the designer who kept the stuff other designers threw away: proofs, running sheets, paper labels for vinyl records, original artwork for classic album covers, videotapes, books and the weird ephemera that was the source of inspiration for many of his most famous works.

‘Vaughan Oliver: Archive’ is in fact two books. The first (‘Materials and fragments’) is arranged around a set of themes – colour, typography, the body, mystery, etc. It also features a selection of his exquisitely designed press ads – most of them unseen since the day they were published in the music press.

The second book (‘Remnants and desires’) features a selection of the PMTs (Photo-Mechanical Transfer prints) that Oliver used as the basis for many of his most famous designs. Some can be recognised as forming parts of famous album covers – others (like his test lettering for an aborted Led Zeppelin project) have never been seen outside of the v23 studio.

The book(s), designed by Spin and written by Adrian Shaughnessy, feature many previously unseen works, including extensive interviews with Oliver, and with contributions from Chris Bigg, his long-standing creative accomplice.

Specifications

Book One
Printed: Litho
 Title: Vaughan Oliver: Archive
Materials and fragments
Size: 210mm × 280mm 
Pages: 432
 Colours: CMYK Toyo inks (with higher colour values achieved)
Binding: Perfect bound. PUR glued
Cover stock: 300 gsm Munken Pure
Book stock: 80 gsm Munken Pure
Sticker: 150 gsm Fasson White Manilla Perm

Book Two
Printed: Litho
Title: Vaughan Oliver: Archive
Remnants and desires 
Size: 210mm × 280mm
 Pages: 164
Colour: Black Toyo ink throughout
Cover: 300 gsm Munken Pure
Pages: 80 gsm Munken Pure
 Binding: Perfect bound. PUR glued.
Sticker: 150 gsm Fasson White Manilla Perm

Slip Case 
Printed: Silkscreen
Colours:  Black with bespoke-mix flouro

Further details
Printed on Komori Lithrone press
Hybrid Print Technology (a Göteborgstryckeriets special technique)
Cold UV drying
Stochastic screen / FM screen
ISO standard 9001

Printer – Göteborgstryckeriets. Sweden

ISBN: 978-0-9956664-8-1

Unit Editions

Paula Scher – Works

24 March 2018 in Books Comment

Paula Scher: Works (concise edition) [Unit 37]
Editors: Tony Brook & Adrian Shaughnessy
Design: Spin

Edition of 2000

‘Paula Scher is the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet’
Ellen Lupton
Abstract: The Art of Design, Netflix

This monograph covers Paula’s early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic records; the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher; and her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.

It also provides an up-to-date look at Paula’s idiosyncratic hand-painted maps, part of her prolific artistic practice that complements her still-growing graphic legacy.

The book also a visual record of contemporary New York’s urban fabric, indelibly transformed by the designer’s innovative approach to environmental graphics and identity design: from MoMA to Charter Schools; from the High Line to Shake Shack.

Her logos for global corporations and cultural institutions have cemented her reputation as a giant of identity design.

A large section of the book is devoted to the designer’s socially and politically motivated posters, New York Times Op-Ed illustrations and campaign work.

In a long interview, Paula’s frank and open words lay bare the reality of design culture in the USA. The 326-page book is designed by Spin, under the creative direction of Tony Brook.

Paula Scher, the ‘accidental postmodernist,’ has come to be seen as an emblem of American design: a ‘master conjurer of the instantly familiar.’ (ted.com)

Size: 203mm×258mm
Pages: 326
Print: Four colour litho
Cover: Foiled with inside flaps
ISBN: 978-0-9956664-7-4

Unit Editions

Herb Lubalin: Typographer – Unit Editions

23 February 2018 in Books Comment

Herb Lubalin: Typographer [Unit 25]
Editors: Adrian Shaughnessy & Tony Brook
Consultant Editor: Alexander Tochilovsky
Design: Spin

Edition of 2000

“This book, published by the London-based design publisher Unit Editions, focuses solely on [Lubalin’s] style of typography design, which Lubalin described both as “graphic expressionism” and “conceptual typography.” It also features lots of lovely spreads from the radical Ginzburg magazines, all of which have gone down in graphic design history.”

Fast Co Design

Herb Lubalin claimed not to be a great typographer. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I’m terrible, because I don’t follow the rules.’ This new book proves the opposite. On every page it features Lubalin’s typographic genius (logos, layouts, lettering and typefaces), and places him at the forefront of 20th century typographic innovation.

He even had names for what he did: he described it as ‘graphic expressionism’ or ‘conceptual typography’. Using his ability to adapt, merge and create new typographic forms, he was able to enhance and amplify meaning in ways that hadn’t been seen before.

Having published two books celebrating the genius of Herb Lubalin as a graphic designer working in many spheres, this new volume concentrates solely on Lubalin’s typography.

It comes with new texts, new design, new photography, and lots of previously unpublished material – and with a price tag that makes it accessible to a wide audience.

Size: 245mm×165mm
Pages: 208
Binding: Lay-flat bound
Special Features: Two paper stocks
ISBN 978-0-9932316-5-0

Unit Editions