When asked to come up with an initiative for Motorola to reach urban tastemakers and editors, I remembered all the irrelevant press releases, PR invites and parties from my days as an editor. Instead, I wanted to come up with a concept that wouldn’t go straight into the bin and related directly to Motorola, so I suggested a book, The First Car Radio on the Moon.

A cross between SMLXL and a flip book, The First Car Radio reinterprets Motorola’s history for the hipster set. The volume takes readers (or page flickers as they tend to be) from the company’s origins developing the car radio in the 1920s through its first car radio on the moon (creating NASA’s communications equipment for the lunar landing) to designing the first mobile phone in the 1970s. In researching the book, I tracked down retired employees and trawled Motorola’s archives finding stories Motorola’s own historians didn’t even know.

I was active in all parts of the book’s development and design. Now The First Car Radio hardly fits into the world of corporate publishing – it’s been covered in magazines like Dazed & Confused, a far step from worrying about editors’ throwing out your press release. Recognized in the Creative Review Annual, The First Car Radio also received a Marketing Magazine design award in the UK and was a finalist in the Design Week awards.