Summer has arrived in London, so here’s a film about the Sun.

Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames presents a rare glimpse of the Solar Film produced by graphic designer Saul Bass. The film was commissioned in 1980 by Robert Redford.

Thanks to Xavier at Swiss Legacy for this.

500 of these poolside summer sneakers will be available in June. Pre-order here.

My favourite coffee mug was designed by Naoto Fukasawa for Plus Minus Zero in Japan. Fukasawa is one of the key people behind Muji products and my mug fits into that whole area of Super Normal design (as Jasper Morrison describes it). High functionality and simple, elegant form, with all excesses of design and decoration removed. To appear un-designed, yet perfect. I would argue that Fukasawa’s mug is pretty much the Platonic ideal of ‘mug’, It is for me anyway. Everything about the mug is right; size, form, handle, thickness, weight. I don’t think a more perfect mug exists.

Went to the premiere of Gary Hustwits’ new film Objectified last night at the Curzon, Kings Road with Blam from Blanka and Mike and Nicky Place. Mike did the graphics for the film and I’ve been busy selling Gary’s posters, Tee’s and DVDs for a while so I was really looking forward to this. Objectified is an excellent documentary film examining the design and manufacture of of objects, from toothbrushes to software.

Dieter Rams was inspirational as ever, my design hero. Jonathan Ive’s tales of designing Apple product also very interesting, Karim Rashid was irritating as ever, and Naoto Fukasawa provided that grounded, practical design sensibility we all need to listen to. The film touched on so many different issues and had so much to talk about, it was hard for it to delve deeply into areas that need much more discussion; the tension between analogue design and digital, the massive complexities of genuine sustainability, the future of interactive design. Whereas Gary’s previous film Helvetica was a specific ‘expose’ into the strange, cultish world of the typographer, Objectified has a brief which is perhaps too broad. An excellent, well shot documentary all the same, and hopefully a film that will appeal to many people.

In the row behind us were Marc Newson, my boss Deyan Sudjic, Jonathan Ive and Stephen Fry – a rather extraordinary collection of minds in one place. After the screening, Newson and Ive joined Hustwit onstage, along with Alice Rawsthorn (previous director of the Design Museum, who very kindly gave me a job!) for a Q+A session. All are very acerbic, engaging and thoughtful speakers – Ive struck me as someone who possesses an extraordinary amount of wisdom for his age.

We then shuffled off for beer and canapes (salsa on silver spoons anyone?) afterwards and plotted clever ways to release the film as a DVD later in the year.

In the meantime, Mike’s excellent Objectified film posters are imminently available in the shop.

Back to Thames + Hudson, who have another anniversary this year. Next month they are releasing a 25th Anniversary Edition of Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper’s Subway Art (1984). No wrap-around covers on this bad-boy. It’s a larger format, revamped version with an extra 70 photos that were not included in the original edition. That’s more like it.

As I mused over this re-issue, I started to think about the personal significance of this book, and especially it’s sister publication Spraycan Art (1987),

The first Thames + Hudson book, indeed the first art book I ever bought was Spraycan Art. In 1987 I was in the second year of comprehensive school, spending my evenings recording Hip Hop and House tracks off the radio and editing together my own early mix-tapes instead of playing football or stealing cars or whatever everyone else was doing. Being into Hip Hop meant I was, by extension, interested in graffiti. I spent a few weeks visiting my local WH Smith’s and thumbing through it while I saved up enough of my paper round money to buy it. I then spent not hours, but days months and years studying it: learning the artists names and styles, copying the graffiti letters onto my school books and submitting 3D typefaces to my bemused art teacher. Subway Art was published earlier, and focussed on the New York Subway trains of the late 70′s and early 80′s, artists like Dondi White, Seen and Lady Pink. Although it only came out three years later, Spraycan Art showed that in a very short space of time graffiti as an art-form had evolved rapidly: Type was now superbly complex, characters were virtual, and the different ideas presented by Futura 2000 (abstract), Mode2 (character illustration) and Vulcan (typography) showed that Graffiti had potential to go further still. Most importantly to me at the time, Spraycan Art showed graffiti not as a localised activity on New York Subways, but now as a Global movement. The fire was rapidly spreading along with all the other Hip Hop Elements – Rapping, Breaking, DJ’ing.

In the North East of England in the 80′s, my total lack of interest in football meant there really wasn’t much else to connect to, to identify with. All the colourful graffiti letters and the determination of these vandals to ‘get over’ with that ‘by any means necessary’ attitude was of course rather inspirational to a teenage kid. I wasn’t alone. These two books opened up graffiti to the UK, and changed things forever.

Compared to now, the UK in the late 80′s was like living in a permanent communications blackout. No mobile phones. No internet. Three and a bit TV channels. No digital cameras. No pirate radio outside of London. No magazines to speak of. This was the level of pre-digital isolation we lived in, which is why opening a book like Spraycan Art in WH Smith’s was akin to finding Narnia in the back of your wardrobe.

Info-lag, the digital disease of web-users, didn’t exist then either – we had so little information on anything, we relished and worshipped whatever we could get our hands on. And the only way to see masses of graffiti in the UK in the 80′s was through these two Thames + Hudson books. They went on to be known as the most stolen books ever published, I have had to replace my own copies about three or four times over the years having loaned them out or simply misplaced them.

I didn’t become a graffiti writer myself. I didn’t really have the nerve. In retrospect I might as well have been, as my early teens were spent walking along train lines, through tunnels, alleys, parks, under bridges, everywhere, with a battered camera, seeking out graffiti pieces. Graffiti taught me to love cities. I became a juvenile urban detective – seeking out walls, spaces, spots and hidden halls of fame in derelict warehouses. I would see untouched open walls and think “yeah, perfect spot that”, see a tag written so high up on a wall I couldn’t work out how it had been done, or best of all, find a huge graffiti piece, paint still fresh, discarded cans lying on the ground. All this hunting and exploring made me feel familiar and at home in cities and to appreciate the inner geography of them. I still do this now – wandering around cities happily lost, waiting to see what turns up.

Spraycan Art was not just my bible, it served as a travel guide too. I used it to navigate my way around London. To Westbourne Park, Ladbroke Grove and to the same walls under the Westway flyover that Mode2 and the Chrome Angels had painted.

It was these explorations, using the book, that I now realise influenced many of my aspirations. I can attribute living in London largely to Spraycan Art. As I searched for graffiti (and record shops), I discovered Four Corners Playground, Camden Town, Soho, Covent Garden, Brixton, West London, North London and naturally decided this was the place for me. How could my North East market town compare? By hunting for graffiti, I discovered London, and was enraptured. At the same time, a teenage passion for graffiti art, book covers, record sleeves and club-flyers, led to a more academic appreciation of graphic design, illustration, architecture and photography. I ended up working as a DJ, working in record shops, book shops, design stores, clubs – somehow keeping my creative personal interests of hip hop and books linked to my work. In this context, my life has more of a logical narrative thread than I thought. Rather than a series of random, disparate events and momentary decisions (I’ve had plenty of those) I can see how Spraycan Art and Subway Art acted as foundational influences on all of my life experience. I now run a design store / bookshop that sells over 10,000 Thames + Hudson books a year, so perhaps I’m unconsciously paying my dues.

The most valuable thing that Graffiti and Hip Hop Culture has taught me is the DIY attitude. The idea that things can be done lo-fi, by ourselves, and we don’t have to follow the typical path. One of the other beautiful things about graffiti is it’s temporary nature, it’s creative futility. Walls are painted over again and again, memories are lost, re-written, and nothing stays around for long. The most inspiring, life affirming aspect of graffiti is the process; the act of doing, of engagement and application. Leaving a mark, taking your space, making it your own, even if just for a fleeting moment, has many positive parallels with a broader approach and attitude towards everyday life.

If you follow the curved gravel path, through the trees to the clearing on top of a hill in Poissy, France, you will find a thin, white, rectangular box. The box is raised, supported by implausibly narrow pillars. This is Villa Savoye, built in 1931 for the Savoye Family by Le Corbusier. The quintessential icon of Modernism, Villa Savoye brings the ethics of industry to the home; favouring precision engineering, functionality, science and aeronautics over domesticity and ornamentation. Inside, furniture is replaced by equipment.

Le Corbusier was asserting the aspirations of industrial modernists and bringing these values into everyday life. In Modernist terms, the definitive answer to the question of beauty in architecture was that the point of a house was not beauty, but functionality. However, despite their claims to a rigidly scientific approach to design, Modernist architects were at heart romantics; they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence. This was their undoing – aesthetic interests defeated the functional approach. Le Corbusier had insisted on a flat roof for the villa, which leaked constantly, and made the house uninhabitable. The interior walls were also paper thin, and extraordinarily expensive to produce. Ultimately, the Savoye family fell out with Le Corbusier for creating a folly, rather than the home of their science-fictional dreams.

What I love about Alan De Botton’s books is that they posit themselves in the style of light self-help books, when in fact they are rather studious and crackling with intelligent observation and insight. They are still self-help books in a way, but without the patronising and idiotic tone and form. While making philosophy accessible and readable is a huge challenge, all of Botton’s books contain illuminations that have stuck in my mind for years.

I read Bottons ‘How Proust can change your life’ about 10 years ago when I was running the Literary Criticism section at Waterstone’s Piccadilly. The shelves were weighed down with books on Proust, and as I knew little about him, I decided Botton’s book was a way in. It is an exceptional introduction not so much to Proust, but to an approach to life, and how to appreciate small, simple, ordinary and everyday things and draw pleasure from them. This is one of Botton’s methods of course, he claims to be talking about one thing, when actually it’s just a backdrop to discuss other matters, usually those of the heart.

I read Consolations of Philosophy later then I should have (after I finished my degree in Philosophy) – Here I discovered Seneca – again Botton provides a useful perspective on how to respond to challenges and difficulties in life.

I went on to read Art of Travel, and the Status Anxiety, and the excellent Architecture of Happiness (which I’m happy to say I’ve sold a couple of hundred copies of in the shop)

Now his latest: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. More on this when I’ve actually read it.

James Lasdun. The first book I read by him was The Horned Man, which I recommend to anyone as a tight psychological thriller and one of the best novels I’ve ever read. In 2005, I read Seven Lies, which was also great, but not as good for me as The Horned Man. What I actually remember most about Seven Lies is that I picked it up from a vast table of new hardbacks in Waterstones, took it to the counter to buy it, and bumped into my ex-boss Marc Valli, who was also in the queue buying the same book. Yet another of my many bizarre book / life coincidences.

Anyway, Lasdun is back with a bunch of short stories based in London. More once I’ve read it…