books tagged “design”

Based on her popular "One Sketch, Many Looks" column, Becky Higgins shares dozens of new sketches and loads of layouts to spark your creativity. The 52 sketches, instantly recognizable as Becky's clean, classic style, give you a new design to sample each week of the year! This must-have book is divided into sections according to how many photos you have to scrapsaving you time! If you have six photos from your DD's birthday party, flip to the six photos layout section and glean inspiration from layouts crafted by Becky and readers. [via]

A lively and lavishly illustrated history of decorative arts from 1950 through 2000, this survey presents 130 key examples of later twentieth-century design in their cultural contexts. The primary focus is furniture-- both one-of-a-kind examples and mass-produced works-- by international designers and architects. Here are classic designs for chairs, shelving units, and lamps by well-known masters from Aarnio to Zanuso, as well as provocative works by newcomers. All the works in Design for Living are from the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection of the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The furniture is presented in five chapters which establish decade by decade, the historical, artistic, and technical currents that led from Good Design and traditional Modernism to Pop Art and Post-Modernism, and to concerns for ecology, pluralism, and spirituality. Full-color photographs and entries on each object profile the design process and the designer, while illustrations show these works in their original period settings. All this recommends Design for Living to the general reader, as well as to the designer, collector, and scholar. Here is an accessible guide and resource to the fifty years of exuberant creativity that mark the second half of the twentieth century.
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Point of view is not to be assumed in Felice Varini's graphic modifications of space. By painting strips of primary colors on the walls, pillars and ceilings of galleries, corridors and abandoned places, Varini alternately creates and destroys the effects of volume as perceived by the viewer. His diagonal lines, circles and squares simultaneously reveal and filter the reality of a place. Essay by Fabiola Lopez. Hardcover, 6.75 x 9.5 in./256 pgs / 220 color 0 BW0 duotone 0 ~ Item D20090 [via]

Intended for web designers, this text delivers information on how to employ information architecture to create intelligent sites that produce hard sales. In today's drastically reduced web market, measurable business returns are essential to clients and this book should equip the designer with the tools to deliver the goods. It is low on theory, high on practice, containing practical examples, how-to's, do's and don'ts and ready-to-use templates that illustrate concepts, tools and deliverables that can be used immediately in real life by anyone responsible for designing web sites. There are also case studies from industry leaders like IBM and Microsoft and clear explanations of cutting-edge research from the academic world. An accompanying web site features all the model templates explained in the title and a free sample chapter and free access to sample templates. [via]

You are not alone. Learn Design with Flash MX employs a unique class-based approach to learning with the goal of establishing core, generic design skills. Each chapter represents a discrete lesson covering a distinct topic of design, and in each 'class' we smoothly blend theory and practice with plentiful practical examples, and a class project that runs through the book to reinforce the learning in an integrated, real-world context, using Flash MX as the illustrative vehicle. Written from the perspective of the design course's tutor, the context is that of a Design 101 course taught in a classroom environment, where the students act as mouthpieces to ask the common questions that beginner designers are sure to ask. You'll get to know the students in the book and follow the development of these characters as your own skill and expertise evolves too. Learn Design with Flash MX covers the fundamental design principles and skills that every designer needs to master in order to create attractive, aesthetically pleasing work to a professional standard.

This book addresses the shortfall in solid, traditional design knowledge in significant segments of the web design community  specifically, people using Flash. It assumes that the reader is a novice in design terms with no exposure to formal web design principles or training, and little or no Flash experience. If you're coming to Flash completely from scratch, this book will give you a broad and solid introduction enabling you to create aesthetically pleasing, well laid-out sites and content, which will help you learn the trade and get access to the professional web design world. This book should even appeal to those who've read one (or more) entry-level texts on Flash; in fact, it'll complement other tutorials by providing the rich general design context and background that other introductory books lack. This book will teach readers to develop and implement their creative ideas through an understanding of what professional designers in all media see as the prerequisites: composition, color, contrast, light, texture, motion, typography, and many others.

If you're interested in learning design skills following a structured path, or if you've been using some of the tools of the trade, like Macromedia Flash, for some time but have never had the opportunity of a solid tutorial, this introductory level book is for you. Learn Design with Flash MX will answer all the essential design questions that other books ignore - the questions you're too frightened to ask. By addressing the core design skills from a beginner's perspective, in the context of Flash MX, readers will gain a rich, solid, and structured understanding of the what, how, and why's of the fundamental principles of good design.

From experienced self-taught designers who've ever thought, "I wish I knew how to design things more effectively or more coherently ", to anyone who's looked at a cool design and said, "Jeez, I wish I'd taken a design class in school!", this book will show them the money! Anyone in the web design arena who wants overall design skills, and who needs a solid learning vehicle that will help them acquire and embed those skills; anyone who's felt that their lack of knowledge about formal design processes has got in the way of liberating their creative ideas effectively; anyone who's started a creative project in a rush, doodled around, and lost their way& this book will provide the structure that they might lack. Readers will come away from this book with:

A rich, solid understanding of the concepts and basic processes that will enable them to explore further with a degree of confidence that they didn't have before
Insights into universally applicable design processes and techniques
An understanding of how to implement these principles in Flash MX

"Learn Design with Flash MX - the missing link between creativity and technology" [via]

Focusing on information design, this guide reveals the visual language of location, direction, spatial and structural relationships which are central to this sector of graphics, exploring "maps" as varied as subway systems and websites to chemical symbols, and the mapping of time. [via]

Mit einem Essay von Steven Heller

Armin Hofmann ist eine Pionierfigur des Schweizer Grafik Design. 1946 nahm er seine langjährige Lehrtätigkeit an der Basler Gewerbeschule auf und entwickelte - später in vitalem Dialog mit Wolfgang Weingart - eine pädagogische Befähigung, die höchste Anerkennung fand die Landschaft des internationalen Grafik Design nachhaltig veränderte. Poster Collection 07 kann durchaus als längst fällige Monographie Hofmanns Werk verstanden werden. Das Buch enthält alle wichtigen Plakate, sowie einige Beispiele seiner bekanntesten Schüler.

What makes us love our things? Why do we attach certain sentiments to certain items? How is it that sometimes objects can tell stories more eloquently than people? These are questions explored and answered in The Uncommon Life of Common Objects. Author Akiko Busch devotes a chapter to each of 12 common objects, and discusses her and others' experiences that give everyday things their significance. Through her examination of: a video camera, a cellular phone, a vegetable peeler, a snowboard, a baby carriage, a chair, a refrigerator, a mailbox, a medicine cabinet, a cereal box, a backpack, and a desk, Busch illuminates the social and personal issues that shape our lives and the ownership of our things. Lovingly illustrated, always touching, sometimes nostalgic, and often hilarious, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, is a topical reader that is at once a personal manifesto, a look at how design influences and responds to our changing lives, and a study of society and its values and the infusion of meaning into inanimate objects. Each of the 12 chapters is accompanied by a four-color drawing. [via]

Riffing on the techie term "wayfinding", which designers and manufacturers use when talking about the function of signs and signage systems as they are used by the viewer, this book, by acclaimed graphic designer and author Per Mollerup, seeks to find a more precise visual language for what sign designers actually do, which is to show the way. Unfortunately, as Mollerup points out, many designers never master the art of wayshowing themselves. For wayshowing relates to wayfinding as writing relates to reading and as talking relates to hearing: The purpose of wayshowing is to facilitate wayfinding. In this accessible but invigorating investigation, Mollerup examines international sign systems and architectural landmarks in detail with his trademark candor and good humor. His analysis is at once pithy, scholarly, and historical. Edited by Per Mollerup. Hardcover, 6.75 x 12 in./256 pgs / 250 color. [via]