To coincide with London Design festival, I helped launch a new publisher, Place Press, and write its first book.
Otl Aicher's Isny explores the ten-year branding project by influential modernist designer Otl Aicher for the small German town of Isny. Aicher is most revered for bringing modernism to the masses through projects like the 1972 Olympics, Braun and Lufthansa. Here he applied those same principles to Isny – a beautiful, colourful town in the Alpine foothills, that he portrayed in black and white.
We road tripped through Southern Germany on a fact-finding mission, visiting Aicher's former studio, his archive, and the charming town of Isny itself.
With preface written by Norman Foster.
"The remarkable story of a project by the German designer that aimed to convey the attractions of a small town in southern Germany through pictograms." – Mark Sinclair, Creative Review
"Viewed against the backdrop of the London Design Festival’s superfluity of far-reaching and futuristic works, Aicher’s illustrative card system seems strikingly contemporary." – Wallpaper*
"A really nicely done, well reported publication that I hope gets some international distribution." – Michael Bierut, Design Observer
The book is available in bookshops in New York, London and Tokyo, or right here.