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back slapping

yesterday evening was the 19th PANL awards ceremony, as i’m a board member i guess i need to be careful about what i say but not all of the prizes were really and truly justified in my opinion…

the book (for which i was the client) was also presented, the fact that the book was to be ‘red’ was a given so the theme i gave the designers (mattmo) was ‘crisis’ a fairly appropriate guide for the past 12 months in dutch commercial photography and one which they interpreted smartly by making the book half of it’s normal size… it works very well despite the compactness of the images and somehow just feels right, it was good to see lots of old friends and have a beer (the ‘awards’ image i borrowed from mattmo’s flickr page, thanks)

the new ‘dutch heights’ book which i mentioned last week also arrived yesterday in the post, it’s beautifully made and has a very cute format but… somehow it just feels like a big back-slapping exercise for the cultural elite and a chance to make yet another book celebrating how ‘fantastic’ dutch design really is… for me it’s more like a confirmation that ‘dutch design’ is becoming more and more bloated, self-congratulatory and less easy to comprehend or feel part of… still, as i said the book is kind of ‘cute’ and besides the fact that i’m english will always place me outside of real ‘dutch design’, which is a good thing if this is what it represents

m / 02-04-2010 14:38

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