We've teamed up with publishers Fiell to offer our readers the chance to win one of five copies of Cult-ure by graphic designer Rian Hughes.

The 356-page paperback bound in faux leather is the result of 10 years work, combining graphics and text to explore the language of signs, symbols and meaning in contemporary culture.

Hughes is particularly interested by the way ideas can now travel further and faster than ever before via the internet.

The volume is divided into eleven chapters: ideas, communications, media, representations, frames and maps, objects, perceptions, solutions, arts, identities and proscriptions.

This competition has now closed.

Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

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Here are some more details from the publisher:

IDEAS CAN BE DANGEROUS

Ideas are the currency of our modern me- dia-driven world. They shape our very culture. CULT-URE is your incisive survival guide for navigating this modern landscape of ideas.

From the far past to the future, it shows how ideas were coded first in signs and symbols - the spoken word, the flag, the alphabet.
Now virulent ideas, whether they be a YouTube video, a political ideology or a fundamentalist religion, have the ultimate delivery mechanism - the internet. Ideas are travelling further and faster, and now have the power to change the cultural landscape like never before.

In our new electronic ‘democracy of ideas’,political and religious authorities no longer controlwhat we are allowed to have access to. Cultural power is devolving to the creative individual, who can now address the world. Soon we will all have the means to create; we just have to decide whether it be art or bombs.

Why do you think what you think? Where do our values, beliefs and prejudices comefrom? How do symbols and signs, the codifed lan- guage of ideas, shape our perceptions? Who controls the very ideas that shape our culture?

Through words and pictures, the language of our media age, CULT-URE powerfully il- lustrates how ideas are created and ma- nipulated.
Culture is your local consensus reality; your clothing, cuisine and hairstyle, the music you listen to, the films you see; it is the lens through which you interpret reality. Cul- ture, unlike your race or eye colour, is not a compulsory accident of birth, but an intel- lectual position.

Written and designed by celebrated graphic designer and illustrator Rian Hughes, CULT- URE represents a new experiment in ‘au- thored design’, a unique melding of graphics and text that provides a thought-provoking exploration of the media age, the pervasive language of signs, symbols and meaning, and the ideas – both benign and dangerous – that travel through them.

The ‘Gideon’s Bible for the boutique hotel’, CULT-URE is an insider’s guide to the changing nature of communication, perception and identity, and is set to become a cult publication for the digital generation – the 21st century answer to Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage.

A must-have bible for anyone interested in the power of ideas, CULT-URE is both a bold graphic statement and a potent inoculation against infection by contagious ideas. CULT-URE will help you survivive the next Cult-ural Revolution.

CULT-URE
Written and designed by Rian Hughes
Published by Publishing Limited December 2010
Bound in faux leather with foil blocking and gold page edges
Size: 229 mm x 152 mm (6x9”)
356 pages, 500 illustrations, die cuts, tip ins.
ISBN 9781906863289
RRP: £24.95/$45.00

Also available in numbered limited edition which includes limited edition print signed by the author, real leather binding, slipcase and sticker set.

About the Author

Rian Hughes is an award-winning graphic designer, comic artist, logo designer, and typographer. He studied graphic design at the London College of Communication before working for an advertising agency i-D magazine, and a series of record sleeve design companies. In 1994 he founded his own studio, Device, and has since worked with a wide range of international clients in publishing, advertising, comic books, music and fashion.

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Congratulations to our winners! David Gonzalez Neguillo from Spain, Henning Aschim Wien in Norway, Bettina Ding from Hong Kong, Lisl du Toit in the UK and Raquel Solar from Australia.