Book picks similar to
Typography Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Working with Type by Ina Saltz
design
typography
graphic-design
non-fiction
Paul Rand: A Designer's Art
Paul Rand - 1985
Graphic Design which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups is not good design if it is irrelevant.Graphic design which evokes the symmetria of Vituvius, the dynamic symmetry of Hambidge, the asymmetry of Mondrian; which is a good gestalt, generated by intuition or by computer, by invention or by a system of coordinates is not good design if it does not communicate.
- Paul Rand
For the design student, teacher, professional designer, and, indeed, for anyone interested in the creative communication of ideas, Paul Rand: A Designer's Art is certain to be a book that is both provocative and enlightening.
Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
Leonard Koren - 1994
Describes the principles of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic associated with Japanese tea ceremonies and based on the belief that true beauty comes from imperfection and incompletion, through text and photographs.
Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules
Jeff Johnson - 2010
But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines. Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In "Designing with the Mind in Mind," Jeff Johnson, author of the best selling "GUI Bloopers," provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow. * The first practical, all-in-one source for practitioners on user interface design rules and why, when and how to apply them.* Provides just enough background into the reasoning behind interface design rules that practitioners can make informed decisions in every project.* Gives practitioners the insight they need to make educated design decisions when confronted with tradeoffs, including competing design rules, time constrictions, or limited resources.
The Art Spirit
Robert Henri - 1929
While it embodies the entire system of his teaching, with much technical advice and critical comment for the student, it also contains inspiration for those to whom the happiness to be found through all the arts is important.No other American painter attracted such a large, intensely personal group of followers as Henri, whose death in 1929 brought to an end a life that has been completely devoted to art. He was an inspired artist and teacher who believed that everyone is vitally concerned in the happiness and wisdom to be found through the arts. Many of his paintings have been acquired by museums and private collectors. Among them are the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Wichita Art Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery.
A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
Roger Von Oech - 1973
The book has been stimulating creativity in millions of readers, translated into eleven languages, and used in seminars around the world.Now Roger von Oech's fully illustrated and updated volume is filled with even more provocative puzzles, anecdotes, exercises, metaphors, cartoons, questions, quotations, stories, and tips designed to systematically break through your mental blocks and unlock your mind for creative thinking. This new edition will attract an entire new generation of readers with updated and mind-stretching material.
Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces
Bruce Willen - 2009
These fundamentals of design, once the exclusive domain of professional typographers, have become an essential starting point for anyone looking for a fresh way to communicate. Practical information about creating letters and type often amounts to a series of guidelines for executing a particular process, font program, or style. But what makes lettering and type endlessly fascinating is the flexibility to interpret and sometimes even break these rules. Lettering & Type is a smart-but- not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one's will. More than just another pretty survey, it is a powerful how-to book full of relevant theory, history, explanatory diagrams, and exercises. While other type design books get hung up on the technical and technological issues of type design and lettering, Lettering & Type features the context and creativity that shape letters and make them interesting. Authors and designers Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals examine classic design examples as well as exciting contemporary lettering of all stripes—from editorial illustrations to concert posters to radical conceptual alphabets. Lettering & Type is ideal for anyone looking to move beyond existing typography and fonts to create, explore, and use original or customized letterforms. This latest addition to our best-selling Design Briefs seriesfeatures a foreword by Ellen Lupton and hundreds of images and examples of work by historical and contemporary designers, artists, and illustrators, including Marian Bantjes, Stefan Sagmeister, Matthew Carter, Christoph Niemann, Steve Powers (ESPO), House Industries, Christian Schwartz, Margaret Kilgallen, James Victore, Abbott Miller, Sibylle Hagmann, Ed Fella, and many more. Throughout the book interviews with type designers, artists, and graphic designers provide real-world perspective from contemporary practitioners.
Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
Scott Belsky - 2010
Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world's problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare. According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be developed by anyone willing to develop their organizational habits and leadership capability. That's why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills. Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of creative people and teams that are especially productive-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again. After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as: •Generate ideas in moderation and kill ideas liberally •Prioritize through nagging •Encourage fighting within your team While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it's better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Raph Koster - 2004
It features a novel way of teaching interactive designers how to create and improve their designs to incorporate the highest degree of fun. As the book shows, designing for fun is all about making interactive products like games highly entertaining, engaging, and addictive. The book's unique approach of providing a highly visual storyboard approach combined with a narrative on the art and practice of designing for fun is sure to be a hit with game and interactive designers.At first glance A Theory of Fun for Game Design is a book that will truly inspire and challenge game designers to think in new ways; however, its universal message will influence designers from all walks of life. This book captures the real essence of what drives us to seek out products and experiences that are truly fun and entertaining. The author masterfully presents his engaging theory by showing readers how many designs are lacking because they are predictable and not engaging enough. He then explains how great designers use different types of elements in new ways to make designs more fun and compelling. Anyone who is interested in design will enjoy how the book works on two levels--as a quick inspiration guide to game design, or as an informative discussion that details the insightful thinking from a great mind in the game industry.
Street Logos
Tristan Manco - 2004
Fresh coats of paint and newly pasted posters appear overnight in cities across the world. New artists, new ideas, and new tactics displace faded images in a perpetual process of renewal and metamorphosis. From Los Angeles to Barcelona, Stockholm to Tokyo, Melbourne to Milan, wall spaces are a breeding ground for graphic and typographic forms as artists unleash their daily creations.Current graffiti art is reflective of the world around it. Using new materials and techniques, its innovators are creating a language of forms and images infused with contemporary graphic design and illustration. Fluent in branding and graphic imagery, they have been replacing tags with more personal logos and shifting from typographic to iconographic forms of communication.Street Logos is a worldwide celebration of these new developments in twenty-first-century graffiti, an essential sourcebook for all art and design professionals, and a delight to everyone excited by the vitality of the street.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
Christopher W. Alexander - 1977
It will enable making a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. ‘Patterns,’ the units of this language, are answers to design problems: how high should a window sill be?; how many stories should a building have?; how much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?More than 250 of the patterns in this language are outlined, each consisting of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature and human action as much in five hundred years as they are today.A Pattern Language is related to Alexander’s other works in the Center for Environmental Structure series: The Timeless Way of Building (introductory volume) and The Oregon Experiment.
Solving Product Design Exercises: Questions & Answers
Artiom Dashinsky - 2018
Prepare for your next job interview."Redesign the NYC metrocard system. Design a dashboard for a general practitioner. Redesign an ATM".Learn how to solve and present exercises like these, that top startups use to interview designers for product design and UI/UX roles. Today top companies are looking for business-minded designers who are not just focused on visuals. With this book you can practice this kind of mindset, prepare for job interview, learn how to interview other designers and find concepts for projects for your portfolio. What will you learn from this book:- Prepare for the design interview — prepare for the design exercise and learn more about how tech companies hire product designers.- Improve your portfolio — use product challenges to showcase in your porfolio instead of unsolicited visual redesigns.- Step up your design career — practice your product design skills to become a better designer and prepare for your next career move.- Interview designers — learn how to interview designers to evaluate their skills in the most efficient and scalable way.What’s inside?- A 7-step framework for solving product design exercises- 30+ examples of exercises similar to exercises used by Google, Facebook, Amazon etc.- 5 full solutions for product design exercises- 5 short interviews with design leaders that worked at Apple, Google, Pinterest, IDEO etc.
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Jesse Schell - 2008
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality video games. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses—one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer—and will understand how to do it.
Real Artists Don't Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age
Jeff Goins - 2017
But the truth is that the world's most successful artists did not starve. In fact, they capitalized on the power of their creative strength. In Real Artists Don't Starve, Jeff Goins debunks the myth of the starving artist by unveiling the ideas that created it and replacing them with timeless strategies for thriving, including:steal from your influences (don't wait for inspiration),collaborate with others (working alone is a surefire way to starve),take strategic risks (instead of reckless ones),make money in order to make more art (it's not selling out), andapprentice under a master (a "lone genius" can never reach full potential).Through inspiring anecdotes of successful creatives both past and present, Goins shows that living by these rules is not only doable but it's also a fulfilling way to thrive.From graphic designers and writers to artists and business professionals, creatives already know that no one is born an artist. Goins' revolutionary rules celebrate the process of becoming an artist, a person who utilizes the imagination in fundamental ways. He reminds creatives that business and art are not mutually exclusive pursuits. In fact, success in business and in life flow from a healthy exercise of creativity.Expanding upon the groundbreaking work in his previous bestseller The Art of Work, Goins explores the tension every creative person and organization faces in an effort to blend the inspired life with a practical path to success. Being creative isn't a disadvantage for success; rather, it is a powerful tool to be harnessed.
Color Design Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design
Noreen Morioka - 2006
From the meanings behind colors to working with color in presentations, this book provides readers with the vital information needed to apply color creatively and effectively to their design work. Readers also receive guidance on talking with clients about color and selling color ideas. The science behind color theory is also explained in easily understood language, and case studies are included to show the effects some color choices had on both their clients and consumers.
The Graphic Design Exercise Book
Jessica Glaser - 2010
The design briefs in The Graphic Design Exercise Book act as sparks to fire your creativity and exercises to broaden your skill set. As prompts for developing your own personal projects they can lead to unexpected developments and revitalized portfolios, helping you break into new and lucrative areas of the design industry.Each brief is illustrated with inspiring reference material providing a visual resource that can be utilized well beyond this book. Sample roughs and visuals show work in progress to give you an insight into the thought processes and creative bent of other designers. Industry insiders share their specialist knowledge, offering professional advice on a selection of fully realized projects.As an additional research tool, The Graphic Design Exercise Book gives you a full glossary and reading list for every genre covered, including:packagingvisual identity and brandingpage layoutmusic graphicsscreen-based design