Design in our Time

Photograph by Scott Breithaupt

Whoever said “form follows function” must not have owned an orange rubber saltshaker or a Peter Max-designed Arizona Iced Tea bottle. With Antiques of the Future, Lisa S. Roberts highlights the design of everything from water bottles to toilet brushes — proving that form and function can, in fact, work quite well together. But lest you think this book’s nothing more than a catalogue of junk, think again. It features a cornucopia of award-winning product design from some of the world’s most important industrial artists, like Karim Rashid, Philippe Starck, and Marcel Wanders.

The book is not only a great guide for design neophytes, but the bright pages, bold graphics, readability, and sense of humor make it a must for the style-savvy, especially if they want to get the goods before they become, well, antiques.

Top it off with a foreword from the king of accessible design, Michael Graves, and you have yourself a coffee-table book worth collecting.