Imagination Monograph

The brainchild of art-school graduate Gary Withers, Imagination Monograph encapsulates the essence of a creative professional collective, Imagination, based on pooled skills, the vision to blend them and now an impressively conceived and packaged book to showcase them. Started in 1978, the company's role finally emerged in the early 1990s as "brand experience", whereby they enable clients to express corporate identity through innovative product presentation that bears Imagination's mark but the client's brand.

The book opens with a laudatory essay by design journalist Stephen Bayley, who accords Imagination the title of "Britain's, and by some measures the world's, biggest design agency". Major commercial players such as Ford and BT have shown repeated and justified faith in Imagination to conceive, construct and choreograph launch events and happenings. What Imagination does, and is, remains intentionally elusive, as the key to its success lies in its fluidity. Referred to by one ex-employee as "a little Bauhaus", it rejects pyramid management for a pancake non-hierarchy that thrives on "partnering", whereby it has an established, trusted network of professionals who can be relied on for whatever a project entails. Their stock-in-trade is the stuff of dreams--their presentations and designs consciously impel the jaw to drop and appeal to an audience ideally with an intelligent brain but little previous product knowledge. From the launch of the Tate Modern, exhibitions at the Natural History Museum, the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin (with a top-level bar lit like the head of a pint, naturally) to several pavilions at the Millennium Dome, they have embraced a sense of theatrical presentation rooted in precision and planning. As a result, a series of stills and designs inevitably can't quite do justice to the scale of their achievement, but the inclusion of preliminary sketches and outlines of the thought behind their work, provide tantalising insights into method and a working environment to be equally admired and envied. Perhaps this, Imagination's philosophy ("to get there quicker") and practices, is the most impressive aspect of a book that illuminates the way forward for corporate presentation, in the most holistic, dare one say, Imaginative, fashion. --David Vincent

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