Living in a Modern Way:California Design 1930–1965 is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011–12. The exhibition is now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, after a stint in Seoul.

With its stylish dust jacket, based on a 1956 record cover by Paul Bass, California Design proclaims the subject’s characteristics from the outset: clean lines, strong colours, modernism, commercialisation. The complex reasons for the emergence of a peculiarly Californian design character from 1930 to 1965 are comprehensively explored in this superbly designed and copiously illustrated volume. The influence of this regional form of modernism, one that largely celebrates the Californian ideal, has been international. Nowhere has its influence been felt more strongly than in Australia.