Author Description

Designing is the capacity to stop just in time, to express no less and no more than is necessary, to neither oversimplify nor make something more complex than it needs to be. It is stripping excessive information and recognizing the essential. The creative process relies on the instinctual, on intuition, yet paradoxically, it is also iterative, requiring thought and more rethinking. This volume is an organic gathering, collected over the past 15 years, of the work of Ezra Petronio and Suzanne Koller, partners in the Paris branch of the international design firm, Work in Progress. It features Petronio and Koller's groundbreaking work on their international style magazine, Self-Service, as well as many additional projects with clients, artists and other creative minds. Print campaigns are featured alongside uncropped original images, as they were seen through the lens of the photographers who took them. Unpublished images, design, research and prototypes are given equal billing with final projects from the public arena--from billboards to storefront windows. Decontextualized and presented from different points of view, the selection of projects wasn't made in search of an absolute, quintessential representation, but more in order to convey the importance of the creative process to this highly sought-after design team.