488 pages, hardcover, $75
Published by Thames & Hudson
thamesandhudson.com

When the publisher of Ray Gun, a West Coast magazine on music and style, hired London-based designer Chris Ashworth for a dream job in 1997, Ashworth was assured he’d have creative freedom designing a magazine that featured many of his favorite bands. Prior, Ray Gun was noted for the innovative design and typography of David Carson, but under Ashworth’s direction, the style became a mix of minimalism and grids of Swiss design combined with the spontaneity and decay of grunge—a style he called Swiss Grit.

Disorder: Swiss Grit Vol. II curates 25 years of Ashworth’s designs and photography. It includes Ray Gun’s page spreads of bands like Depeche Mode, New Order and Radiohead—all featuring Ashworth’s experimental designs. His tools were simply a “scalpel and Sellotape,” just before he added an old scan of his mom’s frying pan for texture or multiple photocopies of letters made with decomposed pieces of Letraset. Ashworth’s style produced slashed, broken letters; text blocks flipped backwards or sideways; and ink-smeared words that overlap or bleed into the next. The effect is often aggressive, sometimes elegant, but most times fun to see in a design context decades after the noise about readability has faded.

An impressive collection of projects fills Ashworth’s portfolio. Among the Ray Gun selections are his corporate designs and commercial projects with musicians like Michael Stipe and Robbie Robertson. The book closes with Ashworth’s type art series Sound in Print and Typewriter Sketches and his vernacular photography that celebrates signage and the beauty of decay. —Ruth Hagopian ca