▲ Curated Selections — February 2026
Staff Picks
Each selection is a design exercise — a study in why certain compositions of language, structure, and idea produce something that endures. Our staff presents their cases.
The Remainder
● Design Exercise No. 01
The Remainder
Three children of former political activists drive through Chile to collect a father's body. The entire novel is a single tension — between what the parents did and what the children inherited. Zerán constructs this as a physical weight: the corpse in the car, the silence between passengers, the road that won't end.
What makes this a masterwork of narrative architecture is its restraint. The structure mirrors the claustrophobia. Every sentence earns its place.
● Why This Composition Works
A novel about inheritance that uses physical space — the car, the road, the body — as its formal constraint. The architecture is the argument. This is point-line-plane thinking applied to prose.
Ways of Seeing
● Design Exercise No. 02
Ways of Seeing
Before every design student learns about grids, they should read this. Berger dismantles how we look — at paintings, at advertisements, at women, at property. The book itself is a designed object: some chapters are only images. The form argues alongside the content.
Fifty years later, it remains the most accessible radical text about visual culture. It teaches you to distrust your eyes — and then to use them better.
● Why This Composition Works
A book about seeing that changes how you see books. The image-only chapters are Berger's most radical move — trusting the reader to compose meaning from sequence alone. Pure Bauhaus pedagogy.
Invisible Cities
● Design Exercise No. 03
Invisible Cities
Marco Polo describes cities to Kublai Khan. Each city is impossible. Each is a meditation on memory, desire, signs, the dead. The book has no plot in any conventional sense — it is a catalogue, a grid, a combinatorial system.
Calvino builds a taxonomy of imaginary places that reads like an architecture textbook written by a poet. The structure is mathematical: 55 cities organized into 11 themes of 5 each, framed by dialogues. It's a lesson in how constraint produces infinite variation.
● Why This Composition Works
The novel as grid system. Calvino proves that the most rigid formal constraints — exactly 55 cities, exactly 11 categories — produce the most liberated imagination. This is the Bauhaus paradox incarnate.
Exercises in Style
● Design Exercise No. 04
Exercises in Style
One trivial anecdote — a man on a bus, a slight altercation, a button — retold 99 times in 99 different styles. Sonnet, telegram, Cockney, mathematical notation, retrograde, haiku. The event never changes. The form transforms everything.
This is the purest possible demonstration that content is inseparable from form. It's a Vorkurs assignment disguised as literature. Every writer, designer, and thinker should own a copy.
● Why This Composition Works
The literary equivalent of Albers' color studies: hold one variable constant, vary everything else, and watch meaning transform. Queneau's 99 exercises are 99 proofs that form is content.
Interaction of Color
● Design Exercise No. 05
Interaction of Color
The book that taught the world that color is the most relative medium in art. Albers' course at Yale — distilled into a sequence of exercises that prove, over and over, that what you see is not what is there. A red next to a blue is a different red than next to a yellow.
This is not a book you read — it is a book you do. Every plate is an assignment. The pedagogy is the content. It has no peer.
● Why This Composition Works
The foundational text of our shop's philosophy. Albers proved that seeing is a discipline, not a gift. This book is the reason FORM & FOLIO exists — a lesson in form, made permanent.