With a toxic green cover and printed book block edges it’s difficult to work out where to put KesselsKramer’s latest book New Kilo on our colour organised bookshelf without it sticking out like a radioactive super-thumb.
New Kilo is the sequel to KesslerKrammers previous monograph 2 Kilo charting all their work to date at the prolific Netherlands agency. Picking up were 2 Kilo left off, New Kilo documents the last 5 years of work in detail from the big campaigns right down to t-shirts and flyers. Though considerably lighter, at about half the thickness but twice the brightness of 2 Kilo, KesselsKramer certainly have skimped on the same quality of work.
Prefaced with a short introduction from KK discussing how the agency has developed since 2 Kilo before launching into brilliant examples of top notch communication work. There’s pretty much no media left untouched by KK from mammoth TV and cinema commercials, experiential, print, web and everything in-between.
As if the quality and quantity wasn’t good enough, each page is accompanied by comprehensive but insightful commentary which really helps to bring context to each piece of work. A simple but often overlooked inclusion that many design books fail in getting right. when it comes to design books. It’s hard to choose which pieces of work stand out as there’s just so much but the frank, to the point messaging for German Dutch hotel Hans Brinker Budget Hotel has to standout as a bit of a winner as well as the work done on telecoms company Ben. Clearly KK are an ideas driven agency who have a great folio of work that proves how successful they’ve been at communicating them.
Overall the work is what you’d expect, a collection of well executed ideas in a tome of a book to match. Even the little details like a the replacement of page numbering instead using weight of pages that you’ve thumbed through is a really nice touch. The only people who might not enjoy this book are eco-enthusiast designers who are just too offended by the brass fluro ink cover. But for the rest of us who can live with the guilt of killing the planet and causing our dolphins friends to shed a tear, go grab a copy of New Kilo now from KK Publishing or Amazon.
As part of the book launch, KK held a talk and launch event at their London gallery KK Outlet, photos of which can be found on the KK Outlet flickr set.
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21st Oct 2010
10:05 am
Nice review but the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel is not a german hotel, but a dutch hotel in Amsterdam
Gil
21st Oct 2010
2:08 pm
Thanks for the heads up David.