From typographic illustrator Marian Bantjes, I Wonder will make you think in new ways about art, design, beauty, and popular culture.

This unique presentation features the elaborately crafted word pictures of Marian Bantjes, the most inventive and creative typographic illustrator of our time. Whether intricately hand-drawn or using computer illustration software, Bantjes's work crosses the boundaries of time, style, and technology. There is, however, another side to Bantjes's visual work: her thoughtful treatises on art, design, beauty, and popular culture that add a deeper dimension to the decorative nature of her best-known work. These reflections cover the cult of Santa, road-side advertising, photography and memory, the alphabet's letterforms, heraldry, and stars. Bantjes's writing style ranges from the playful to the confrontational, but it is always imbued with perspicacity, insight, and a sense of fun. Intended to inspire creatives of any persuasion, this is more than a collection of ideas: Bantjes has meticulously illustrated every page of the book in her inimitable style to create an accessible work of art that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Quirky, poignant, astute, funny--this beautiful book presents a compelling collection of observations on visual culture and design. In Stefan Sagmeister's telling words, Bantjes's work is his "favorite example of beauty facilitating the communication of meaning."

This paperback edition is expanded with a new essay from the author.

Marian Bantjes' profile page

Stefan Sagmeister's profile page

MARIAN BANTJES started working as a book typesetter in Canada in the mid-1980s, later opening her own successful firm. In 2003, working in her studio on a small island off the coast of Vancouver, she began to develop her own style of typography. Since then, her work has developed an international following.

"I Wonder is not a monograph but, in Bantjes’s words, “a book of ideas,” a generous collection of essays lovingly typeset, illustrated, laid out and produced in a manner that resists a quick glance, a skim read or any easy generalization or summary."
—John L. Walters, Eye

"I am compelled to write about I Wonder with as much flourish as is graphically demonstrated on page after page... it is a wondrous, if breathless, display of virtuosic craft."
—Steven Heller, New York Times Magazine

"I Wonder is more than just eye candy...[it] is a playground for Marian Bantjes’s non-conformist emotional approach to design. This stance, which draws its vitality from a childish curiosity, makes it a marvelous antithesis to increasingly strategic and calculated communication design."
—Wiebke Lang, Form
"I Wonder by Marian Bantjes features treatises on art, design, beauty, and popular culture by an up-and-coming graphic designer alongside her own work, done both by hand and with computer software."
—Publishers Weekly