Nathan Yong
2014
‘Being: The Thoughts and Work of Nathan Yong, 2006–2014’ is a monograph on the award-winning product designer Nathan Yong and mainly consists of essays, interviews, product descriptions and personal sketches.
The title, ‘Being’, connotes a sense of ‘pure existence’ in objects that are ‘truthful’ in design. With this consideration, the book cover takes on an honest approach of presenting what is within the book, as opposed to being largely cosmetic, pretentious and market-driven. This is done by using the ‘cut’ and ‘paste into place’ (software) functions to derive the positions of the cover images from the referenced pages within. The honest approach appropriately reflects Nathan’s brutalist mentality in both his design and critique, while acting as a useful visual summary of the book’s contents.
Inside, the essays and interviews are turned on their heads, with small footnote-like titles that appear at the beginning of each article. Images are seemingly ‘pasted’ and tipped-in at random to remain true to our design drafts, which contain Nathan’s blatantly cut-out and hand-pasted images as placement instructions. These are juxtaposed with original sketches and product descriptions that are set in a large clear monospaced font commonly used for indexing.
