Book Review of Sony Design: Making Modern

From the book: “Despite its technological innocence, the Walkman caused a significant social shift. Users could withdraw into a private world even while still engaged in negotiating the physical one.”

Showcasing Sony’s timeless design, iconic products, Sony Design: Making Modern approaches the electronics company’s history with a nostalgic twist. Representative of another era—the tapecorder— as well as learning to turn the page with regard to bygone products (its VAIO personal computer line, for one), the book allows the reader to understand how Sony started in a war-torn Japan and rose to the top, all the while creating what British writer and broadcaster Deyan Sudjic calls a “distinctive visual identity in the 1960s with a restrained silver and black palette.” Sudjic, who penned the book’s introduction, does not forgo Sony’s early days: rickety products, mostly never sent to production, assembled from metal scraps leftover from the bombings, but never forgetting design and functionality.

Featuring both color and black and white images, design enthusiasts will appreciate Sony Design for its simplistic story-telling of one of the most recognized—and successful—consumer electronics companies in the world, spanning the Walkman to the Playstation, but not forgetting the Trinitron television, the ingenious Handycam, and of course, the most monumental of them all: the Minidisc player, the precursor of the now ubiquitous click-wheel digital player from a competitor.