Lesley Jackson

Modern British Furniture

Design since 1945

Victoria and Albert Museum

2013   |  279 × 210mm   |  320pp

Thinking in three dimensions. Reproductions of paintings, drawings and photographs are resolutely flat and combine easily with type on the two-dimensional surface of a page. Here the challenge was to make the images of three-dimensional furniture sit comfortably alongside each other. The photographs were taken long before the layout was considered, but I soon realised that sightlines were the key. If the photographer was looking down on a table, it needed to be shown in the bottom half of the page, whereas furniture shown in profile might run across the top. Nothing dates as quickly as fashion, so, with items from 1945 to the present day featured, the typography is blandly modernist rather than alluding to a specific decade.