Rating: 3/5
I finished these books months ago, but I’m just now getting around to posting about them. This is a series of coffee-table-style books (meaning mostly full-colour photos) that take a discipline and present one author’s take on the 100 ideas that changed that field. There are six books in the series:art, graphic design, photography, film, architecture, and fashion. I wasn’t able to get a hold of the art and photography books.
Overall I enjoyed the books. If you just want a high-level overview of the development of a field, this is a fine place to start. The photos are great (warning, though, that the fashion and film books do contain nudity) and the bibliographies are a good jumping-off point, too.
The typography of all the books really bothered me, though. They used justified columns (which is a good thing) but they made no attempt to smooth out the word spacing. If you are going to justify text, you must allow hyphenation and you will have to review the layout for awkward spacing. They just seemed to drop the text in and printed the book. This was particularly disturbing/ironic in the graphic design book.
Ultimately, I think I would rank the books as follows, from favourite to least favourite: fashion, film, architecture, and graphic design. Enjoy!