“Have you noticed how iconic everything is these days? I’m iconic, you’re iconic, we’re all iconic,” rants British satirist Craig Brown in the opening pages of historian Grace Lees-Maffei’s latest book, Iconic Designs: 50 Stories About 50 Things (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, $40). In the beautifully illustrated anthology, Lees-Maffei examines what it means for a work of design to be “iconic,” pairing 50 visual phenomena (the Eiffel Tower, Hello Kitty, and the Helvetica font, to name a few) with 50 essays by cultural critics including the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Chief Contemporary Curator Susan Lambert and design professor Kenneth L. Ames. The result is a collection of compelling stories that breathe new life into even the most commonplace designs.
