“More than any other designer in recent years, Markus Weisbeck has turned the book into a medium for curatorial experimentation. The unity of the book is no longer a given, instead he allows for heterogeneous, discursive levels that cannot really be forced into a whole. In Weisbeck’s creations they live next to each other, creating tensions that are never fully resolved. Behind the harmonious and often very elegant surfaces, these books thus harbor productive conflicts.” —Daniel Birnbaum “In these designs, Markus once again showed his complete mastery of the montage of different referential surfaces and the processes of the conceptual copying of historic traces and time-saturated tropes of the graphic design of various modernisms into the visual, printing, and design regimes of the present: an art in which he is an almost unequalled virtuoso.” —Georg Schöllhammer By its very nature, graphic design is primarily concerned with giving shape to ideas and information generated by others. For the last decade, Markus Weisbeck has been redefining this prevailing client-designer relationship and subsequently challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. This pocket book presents a selection of seminal graphic design projects developed by Weisbeck and his firm, Surface, over the last ten years; projects that strongly reveal Surface’s experimental approach and conceptual dexterity, contributing to and informing contemporary graphic design. As the designer of the Lukas & Sternberg Pocket Book Series, Weisbeck has implemented his graphic strategy with twenty distinct titles, the twenty-first of which he is both designer and author. This book presents select projects by Weisbeck and Surface, each illustrated by the graphics themselves, short descriptions, and texts by Weisbeck’s clients and collaborators. For further information about the launch, or for press inquiries and orders, please contact: mail@sternberg-press.com. Markus Weisbeck Surface Lukas & Sternberg, #021 April 2011, English 11 x 17 cm, 200 pages, 116 color ill., softcover ISBN 978-1-934105-32-0