Martin Venezky is not your typical point-and-click designer. While he is adept at operating a mouse, he is just as comfortable cutting and pasting type from old books or collaging found signs or making his own photographs. What results are the unique creations of a unique eye. And with this eye and his design firm, Appetite Engineers, Venezky has created beautiful and influential work for Speak and Open magazines, the Sundance Film Festival, Reebok, and numerous publishers and institutions.

It Is Beautiful...Then Gone presents Venzky's commercial design work as well as new graphic work created for the book; details of the wall collage that define his office and his aesthetic; the singular photography, collections, and notebooks that define his personality; and text that explains -- or at least questions -- it all. Venezky's philosophy that life and design are a continuation of each other permeates this elegant book filled with hundreds of idiosyncratic, deeply wrought examples.