I bought the latest PRINT magazine's REGIONAL DESIGN ANNUAL
NOV/DEC 2003 and in the Brand Packaging section where they cover publications designers might usefully encounter what should I see but

BOOKS IN PRINT: Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. Reviewed by Victor Margolin

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Designers are rarely the central characters of novels. Perhaps the most famous design protagonist is Howard Roark, the architect hero of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, while the least well known may be Winter Sorbeck, the svengalien professor of graphic design in Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys.
Cayce Pollard ... is not actually a designer but she is immersed in the world of design.

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Margolin writes widely on graphic design issues and his take on PR makes points I've seen raised in this forum but nowhere else:

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Gibson shows a nuanced understanding of the subleties of "cybersociality"* and he uses this to good advantage in crafting Pattern Recognition's plot.

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*sorry, colin

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Just as John Le Carr� managed to find intrigue in situations other than the Cold War struggles between American and Soviet spies, so does Gibson identify the world of image-making as a crucible where forces of good and evil struggle for hegemony.* Like postmodern theorists of globalisation, Gibson sees the ability to commodify experience�in the form of consumer products and their brand identities�as a form of power.

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*yes, he used that word. A little wink there?

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Before the branding ethos became so pervasive, it would have been difficult to turn a designer's skill to ferret out a new product idea or judge a successful logo into the the substance of a compelling story. But Gibson has recognized the way that design, through the omnipresence of branded products, has insinuated itself into the global consciousness. Thus the search for patterns, which is the central theme of the novel, becomes a metaphor for social control, a theme Gibson references but doesn't thoroughly explore ... The reader must consider whether Gibson has thoroughly considered its implications or whether it functions pragmatically as an armature for a more suspenseful tale.

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We of course did nothing else for six months or so.
He wraps it up with the also familiar-from-our-WGB summary:

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Whereas Neuromancer retains an air of mystery and uncertainty at its conclusion, the loose ends in Pattern Recognition are tied up a little too neatly. But Gibson is a master at combining isolated fragments of contemporary culture into narrative forms. Even when these are less than profound, these patterns still reveal things we did not know before.

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It's like having my doctor pals watching ER with me - kinda irrelevant, but kinda fun. Non designers may find it all irrelevant but hey - nitpicking is what designers are made for.

[This message was edited by Sentinel400 on November 29, 2003 at 07:46 PM.]