From Adri­an Shaugh­nessy and Tony Brook comes Unit Edi­tions, a south Lon­don pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny pro­duc­ing books on design and visu­al cul­ture.

Mul­ti award win­ning Tony Brook is known for work pro­duced through his design stu­dio Spin. Much of the work has been exhib­it­ed glob­al­ly and doc­u­ment­ed in many pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Graph­ic Design for the 21st Cen­tu­ry. Tony is pres­i­dent of the UK chap­ter of AGI.

Adri­an Shaugh­nessy has authored many titles includ­ing How to be a Graph­ic Design­er With­out Los­ing Your Soul and Graph­ic Design: A User’s Man­u­al. He is also host of the inter­net radio show Graph­ic Design on the Radio.

I talked with Adri­an Shaugh­nessy to get up to speed with what’s in store at Unit Edi­tions.

Theo Rosendorf: What top­ics does Unit Edi­tions deal in?

Adri­an Shaugh­nessy: Our ambi­tion is to pro­duce books on a wide vari­ety of top­ics relat­ing to graph­ic design and visu­al cul­ture. I can’t see us pro­duc­ing books on how to use soft­ware pack­ages, but I’d hate to rule out any top­ic that was of inter­est to design­ers.

Amongst oth­er things, we have an ambi­tion to pub­lish books on his­tor­i­cal sub­jects. There is a dis­con­nect when it comes to design his­to­ry. If you talk to main­stream pub­lish­ers – even those with exten­sive back cat­a­logues of design books – they will tell you that his­tor­i­cal sub­jects don’t sell. We’re not con­vinced. I think the fail­ure of his­tor­i­cal titles has got more to do with the way pub­lish­ers put these books togeth­er: they are often bad­ly designed and writ­ten pure­ly for an aca­d­e­m­ic audi­ence. Dull, in a word.

Poor sales can’t be because there isn’t any inter­est in the his­to­ry of graph­ic design. Look at the inter­net – it’s stuffed with exam­ples of his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al. One of the ways we’ve dri­ven peo­ple to the Unit Edi­tions web­site is through a Flickr site that Tony has been build­ing up. He is a col­lec­tor and has an archive of fan­tas­tic jour­nals, mag­a­zines, books and posters by Swiss, Dutch, Ger­man, and Amer­i­can design­ers. From time to time he dips into this trove and plucks out a few unseen gems and posts them on Flikr. The effect is aston­ish­ing. With­in min­utes peo­ple are respond­ing – and many of these hard­core design fans find their way onto the Unit site.

Besides his­tor­i­cal sub­jects, we want to look at the con­tem­po­rary scene, too. We’ve got an impor­tant book lined up for next year that we’ll be announc­ing soon. The sub­ject mat­ter is con­tem­po­rary, but we want to show that what is cool and vibrant now often has links with what was cool and vibrant in the past – so the book will encom­pass the con­tem­po­rary and the his­tor­i­cal.

We’re also com­mit­ted to pub­lish­ing books by design­ers and writ­ers we admire. We want oth­er voic­es and oth­er opin­ions to enter the Unit blood­stream. But what­ev­er we do, our books will always be char­ac­terised by superb design and pro­duc­tion. Each of our books will be an embod­i­ment of the ethos that under­pins Unit – name­ly that design is our para­mount, first and num­ber one con­cern.

I imag­ine you’re prepar­ing for an onslaught of query let­ters. How do you select books for pub­li­ca­tion?

Well, its still ear­ly days for us. We have no track record to help us decide what books will find a mar­ket, so we are rely­ing on our intu­ition and the expe­ri­ence we have gained from pub­lish­ing mate­r­i­al our­selves. Tony has pro­duced three issues of a jour­nal called Spin [link through Spin’s stu­dio projects] and he has sold lots of these. I’ve done about 8–9 books with a com­mer­cial pub­lish­er and all of them have been suc­cess­ful – some more so than oth­ers. We both spend a lot of time in design schools, we both read the design press, the blogs, and the lit­er­a­ture of graph­ic design. In addi­tion we both have an exten­sive net­work for friends and con­tacts in all areas of design.

So, I would say we have a good grasp of what design­ers want from books. But in the end it comes down to our intu­ition. We want to pub­lish books that we would like to see in print – and that’s the main way we are arriv­ing at a deci­sion about the books we will pub­lish.

Does Unit Edi­tions have a phys­i­cal loca­tion or is it com­plete­ly web-based?

We are based at the Spin design stu­dio in south Lon­don. It’s a delight­ful airy space. I’m there one or two days a week, but the rest of the time I’m based at my home stu­dio. For writ­ing and edit­ing duties I need as few dis­trac­tions as pos­si­ble.

I agree. A her­met­i­cal­ly sealed, cli­mate con­trolled pod would be ide­al. How much con­trol does Unit Edi­tions exer­cise with edit­ing its pub­li­ca­tions?

Tony and me have both lived and worked as Cre­ative Direc­tors of design stu­dios for most of our lives – Tony still does this, but I gave up stu­dio life six years ago. As Cre­ative Direc­tors our phi­los­o­phy is to design­ers as much free­dom as pos­si­ble, and only inter­ven­ing when they go off track. Yet it is only pos­si­ble to adopt a hands-off approach when you work with good peo­ple. If you employ sec­ond-rate design­ers then you have to inter­vene all the time.

It’s the same with the authors or the exter­nal design­ers we decide to work with on books. Edit­ing is like being a Cre­ative Direc­tor, it only works if your inter­ven­tion is want­ed and respect­ed, so we’d only want to work with peo­ple who felt that our edi­to­r­i­al or design inter­ven­tions were wel­come. If we were con­so­nant­ly at war with an author or a design­er then it prob­a­bly would­n’t be the sort of book we’d want to pub­lish – although a bit of cre­ative fric­tion can often help reach a deep­er and rich­er out­come.

In light of the inter­net and social medi­ums, what mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels do you use?

We are dis­trib­uted in the UK, Europe and the US by major book dis­trib­u­tors. They will get our books into book­shops and are the best in their fields. But we are also plan­ning to sell spe­cial ‘design­er’ edi­tions of our books on our web­site. Our web­site is a blog – it’s a cus­tomized Word­Press site, low cost but effec­tive. We have a Face­book page and an active and well-attend­ed Flickr site, as I’ve already men­tioned. Against my instincts I am also going to start Tweet­ing – but I’m not entire­ly con­vinced by it as a plat­form so I’m just dip­ping my toes. At the moment our ener­gies are going into the Unit web­site. We want to make it into an essen­tial des­ti­na­tion for design­ers – although we’ve got some pret­ty stiff com­pe­ti­tion in that area!

What are your thoughts on small vs dom­i­nant chain book­stores? Who do you pre­fer to stock with?

We are hap­py to be in any book­store – phys­i­cal or online – that wants to stock our books. But we’re keen to work with some of the small­er spe­cial­ist shops. In the UK there is a won­der­ful mini-chain of shops sell­ing design books called Mag­ma. We know the own­er real­ly well, and he’s being incred­i­bly sup­port­ive. He’s giv­en us win­dows to pro­mote Stu­dio Cul­ture in the weeks around its pub­li­ca­tion. We are also going to Ams­ter­dam to give a talk at a won­der­ful book shop called Nijhof & Lee We’ll post details of this and oth­er talks on our web­site.

We’ve been stag­gered by the num­ber of books we’ve pre-sold from our web­site. The ver­sion we offer online is signed by Tony and me and it comes with a dif­fer­ent cov­er from the ver­sion that is sold in the shops. It’s made us realise that we can build a pub­lish­ing busi­ness that func­tions online as well as through con­ven­tion­al retail out­lets. The dis­counts the chains demand are pret­ty hor­ren­dous, and by the time the dis­trib­u­tor has tak­en their cut, there isn’t much left. I’d always want to see our books in book­stores – and I real­ly hope book­stores don’t go the way of record shops and van­ish – but in order to sur­vive we are going to have to sell direct to our audi­ence. And since our audi­ence is design­ers, and since design­ers ‘live’ online, that means we have to use the inter­net.

What are your pro­fes­sion­al back­grounds?

Before found­ing our respec­tive stu­dios, both Tony and I worked sep­a­rate­ly for design com­pa­nies doing record cov­ers. Tony found­ed Spin in 1991 and is the studio’s Cre­ative Direc­tor. He runs Spin in part­ner­ship with his wife Patri­cia Fine­gan, who is the busi­ness man­ag­er of Unit Edi­tions. Spin has worked for numer­ous clients such as Chan­nel 4, Nike and ICA. The stu­dio has won count­less awards, and has designed numer­ous books and pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing the suc­cess­ful Spin [link through Spin’s stu­dio projects] series of pub­li­ca­tions. He is pres­i­dent of the UK chap­ter of AGI, and is a recog­nised col­lec­tor of graph­ic design arte­facts. He lec­tures exten­sive­ly around the world.

I co-found­ed the design stu­dio Intro in 1989, but left to work as an inde­pen­dent art direc­tor and writer in 2003. I’ve writ­ten, edit­ed and designed numer­ous books includ­ing How to be a Graph­ic Design­er With­out Los­ing Your Soul, which has sold 70,000 copies, and I’ve got a new book out called Graph­ic Design: A User’s Man­u­al. I write for many design mag­a­zines, and I’m a con­trib­u­tor to Design Observ­er, the world’s most wide­ly read design blog. I do a lot of lec­tur­ing all over the world.

What does Unit Edi­tions cur­rent­ly have in the works?

Ah, that would be telling. Very com­pet­i­tive this pub­lish­ing game! But we should be able to announce our next title in a month or two. It is more of an image book than Stu­dio Cul­ture, but it will have plen­ty of texts and inter­est­ing com­men­taries. It is about a graph­ic design top­ic that, amaz­ing­ly, has­n’t been cov­ered in book form yet. It is planned for pub­li­ca­tion in 2010. We have a long list of titles we are con­sid­er­ing – watch this space!