No such shortcomings afflicts Infiltrate: The Front Lines of the New York Design Scene, a compendium showcasing the work of 23 studios and individuals selected by designer Alexander Gelman. Interviews and detailed captions are included here in spades proving that you should be careful what you wish for. The interviews are so long in fact, that in most cases the text runs longer than the allotted space and is continued on a Web site, creating a reading experience that is one part innovative and two parts annoying. The captions are packed with information-some are just long lists of credits, but others provide interesting context for the images. Unfortunately, due to their vertical orientation and immense line length, the captions are almost impossible to read.

The interviews make for engrossing reading, however. Their sheer unedited excess is revealing not only of the designers profiled but also-perhaps even more-of Gelman himself. There is a squirm-inducing scene in an interview with Steven Mark Klein and Michael Felber, the partners of Lone, in which Gelman reprimands them for their inability to keep to the linear sequence of the interview. "This time let's keep it interactive," Gelman insists. "No monologues please. Question. Answer. Question. Answer. Okay?" As if on cue, the partners launch into long monologues. After some time, Gelman cuts in: "You guys, can we just do the question, answer, question, answer?"

Steven: "If you have a sheet, just do it. Question, answer. Question, answer."

Gelman: "Well, I don't have a sheet, I want to react to your answers, so I don't have a sheet."

Michael: "We'll just keep it short."

It's a shame that the confidence Gelman demonstrates here, by allowing these frank and sometimes comical exchanges to remain intact, is not applied to the rest of Infiltrate. While the mechanisms of the interview process are exposed, the premise of the book and the rationale for the selection of designers are much less transparent. There are no duff choices, but it's somewhat jarring to assess student work alongside the oeuvres of established designers and studios such as Stefan Sagmeister, Base Design, and Gelman's studio Design Machine, which the author includes in the mix. The conceptual confusion shown by such juxtapositions is similarly conveyed by the book's title, in which aggressive military language is applied to something as nebulous as a "design scene."

Both of these books showcase some impressive design. What they suffer from, however, is the lack of strong editorial direction: In the first case, the words are too few, and, in the second, they are sprayed out over the pages like grapeshot. Making a great book is not a matter of adding features such an introductory essays or informative captions-although these help-it's about paying the same attention to the book's words as to its design, thereby achieving a meaningful integration of text and image.