Hasta La Ideas

Sent to CR recently: Faber’s 2010 catalogue and the illustrated short story collection, We Are The Friction, both proudly wearing their stats on their sleeves…

In CR’s January issue, Michael Johnson wrote about designer Nicholas Feltron’s latest Annual Report, which divulged every mile he had travelled in the course of 2008, how many emails he’d sent and received, what he’d eaten, even each and every type of music he’d listened to.

In an equally self-centred feat of statistics compilation, Christopher Doyle’s Identity Guidelines also showed that anything and everything about one’s life – particularly that of an information designer – could be run through the old graphs and pie-charts mill.

So the technique was already familiar when we saw the new Faber & Faber catalogue (which includes details from how many crates were used to move the company to its new London office, to the amount of tea and coffee consumed once at said new office) and the cover of an interesting new publication which pairs up a series of fiction writers (and a few songwriters) with some great illustrators.

And, intriguingly, We Are The Friction promises “two horse deaths”; a whopping “six instances of the ocean”; and even “one sentient muffin”.

Rather than coming across as self-absorbed, the technique as used on WATF’s cover impies that, within the 136 pages, there really is something for everyone.

WATF is the second book edited, designed and published by Sing Statistics and is available at singstatistics.co.uk for £12.

All spreads from We Are The Friction