What immediately strikes one here is the title, which is in every sense bold, placed vertically on the front cover and repeated on the spine with extensions to front and back in the form of short, bold bars that return on the text pages in the interior. This device is well suited to a solidly constructed book dealing with the first ten years of interactive architecture.
Once inside, however, we are in a different world, a world of ingenious systems or, in the words of one panel member, a world of fiddliness. A book packed unbelievably full of information to which all sorts of extra layers have been added, with oases of rest in the shape of the pages of solid blue marking the end and beginning of sections, some of them returning to the bold typography of the cover, reversed out for section titles.
One neat idea is the conspicuous bright blue words linked by a hairline rule to an extra layer of information, likewise in blue, at the bottom of the page – in effect a kind of hypertext. Then there is another layer consisting of miniature illustrations and a count of words used, again at the bottom of the page – a whole load of extra information.
A modern book with design decisions that make the most of recent digital developments, even if it all verges on the limit of the amount of information and number of cross-references that a reader will be able or willing to process.