I Am Almost Always Hungry

Cahan & Associates, a San Francisco-based graphic design firm founded in 1984, has designed some of the most inventive corporate annual reports of the past decade-maybe even of the past two decades. In a genre known for client interference and formulaic results, principal Bill Cahan's astute conceptual thinking and clever typographic compositions are so genuinely smart that the firm deserves all the praise it has received in recent design annuals and magazines. Which is why the first monograph of Cahan & Associates' work, I Am Almost Always Hungry, a brick-- sized paperback comprised of double-folded sheets and inserts of various colored paper stocks, is sadly disappointing.

Here is an enterprising design company that transcends cliche on a consistent basis, through a marriage of wit, elegance, and the keen ability to animate the printed page. As an editor of thematic "compilation books" myself, I gravitate to Cahan's submissions, not because I am attuned to a recognizable style-in fact, there is no obvious Cahan graphic style-but rather because the firm comes up with the most surprising conceptual solutions to common design problems. And yet the book, though pleasing to the touch, exhibits too many contemporary cliches, particularly of the "conceptual artist book" variety.

Rather than simply showcase the company's work, Cahan & Associates took a more dubious route. Cahan followed the lead of Tomato, Pure Fuel, David Carson, and the late P. Scott Makela and Laurie Haycock Makela, each of whom recently produced expressionistic assemblages...