Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation


Frederick Franck - 1973
    A Dutch artist offers his concept of seeing and drawing as a discipline by which the world may be rediscovered, a way of experiencing Zen.

The Photograph as Contemporary Art


Charlotte Cotton - 2004
    A short illustrated survey of the use of photography in contemporary art since the mid-1980s.

Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces: A Mixed-Media Portrait Workshop


Jane Davenport - 2015
    Author Jane Davenport is a beloved artist and international workshop instructor known by her thousands of students and fans for her over-the-top, enthusiastic, happy, and encouraging style. In Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces, Davenport guides you, step by step, through the foundations of drawing a face, developing successful features, creating skin tones, playing with bright colors, shading, highlighting, and much more as you learn to create amazing mixed-media portraits.With this elegantly designed guidebook, you will quickly master a variety of techniques in a variety ofmediums, including:PencilMarkerPenWatercolorAcrylic paintInkPastelEphemeraDrawing and Painting Beautiful Faces will have you dancing your way through the exercises. In no time at all, you will have a selection of beautifully faced portraits ready to view, display, or even sell to a fashion designer.

Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design


Dorr Bothwell - 1977
    In composition, it recognizes the separate but equally important identity of both a shape and its background.Since their introduction in the West, the intriguing exercises associated with Notan have produced striking results in every branch of Western art and design. This book, by two American artists and teachers who made an intensive study of Notan, was the first basic book on the subject in the West, and it remains one of the definitive texts. Through a series of simple exercises, it places the extraordinary creative resources of Notan easily within the grasp of Western artists and designers.Clearly and concisely, the authors demonstrate Notan's practical applications in six problems of progressive difficulty — creative exercises that will fascinate artists and designers of every calling and level of expertise. Along with these exercises, the book includes many illustrations of the principle of Notan, among them images as diverse as a sculpture by David Smith, a Samoan tapa cloth, a Museum of Modern Art shopping bag, New England gravestone rubbings, Japanese wrapping paper, a painting by Robert Motherwell, a psychedelic poster, and a carved and dyed Nigerian calabash. Painters, sculptors, potters, jewelry, and textile designers, architects, and interior designers all will discover — or rediscover — in these pages an ancient principle of composition that can help them meet creative challenges with fresh new perspective.

Hello World: Where Design Meets Life


Alice Rawsthorn - 2012
    When deployed wisely, it can bring us pleasure, choice, strength, decency and much more. But if its power is abused, the outcome can be wasteful, confusing, humiliating, even dangerous. None of us can avoid being affected by design, whether or not we wish to. It is so ubiquitous that it determines how we feel and what we do, often without our noticing.Hello World explores design's influence on our lives. Written by the renowned design critic Alice Rawsthorn and designed by the award-winning book designer Irma Boom, it describes how warlords, scientists, farmers, hackers, activists and designers have used design to different ends throughout history: from the macabre symbol invented by 18th century pirates to terrorise their victims into surrender, to one woman's quest for the best possible prosthetic legs and the evolution of the World Cup ball.At a time when we face colossal changes, unprecedented in their speed, scale and intensity - from the deepening environmental crisis, to giant leaps in science and technology - Hello World explains how design can help us to make sense of them andto turn them to our advantage.

Obey: Supply and Demand


Shepard Fairey - 2006
    Through the lens of esteemed writers and critics such as Carlo McCormick, Steven Heller and Roger Gastman, Fairey's work is seen for all its depth and placed in context as art, design, social experiment and "getting over". This massive book pulls no punches and all areas of the enigmatic artist's work, travels and travails are illuminated; from exhibitions, posters, flyers, silkscreens and stickers to high altitude pursuits, citations and police beatings, it's all documented in a museum quality layout and binding. The evidence is in, and it's clear that Shepard Fairey is not one to rest on his laurels, the work must go on. For both long time fans wanting the complete collection and those just curious to know what this OBEY business is all about Supply and Demand is the answer.

Werner's Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts


Patrick Syme - 1814
    This new edition brings the classic work back to life.In the late eighteenth century, mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner devised a standardized color scheme that allowed him to describe even the subtlest of chromatic differences with consistent terminology. His scheme was then adapted by an Edinburgh flower painter, Patrick Syme, who used the actual minerals described by Werner to create the color charts in the book, enhancing them with examples from flora and fauna.In the pre-photographic age, almost all visual details had to be captured via the written word, and scientific observers could not afford ambiguity in their descriptions. Werner's handbook became an invaluable resource for naturalists and anthropologists, including Charles Darwin, who used it to identify colors in nature during his seminal voyage on the HMS Beagle. Werner's terminology lent both precision and lyricism to Darwin's pioneering writings, enabling his readers to envision a world they would never see.Werner's Nomenclature of Colours is a charming artifact from the golden age of natural history and global exploration. This beautiful pocket-size facsimile is certain to delight and inform a new generation of artists and scientists.

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built


Stewart Brand - 1994
    How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.

Remarks on Colour


Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1977
    It is one of the few documents which shows him concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue. The principal theme is the features of different colours, of different kinds of colour (metallic colour, the colours of flames, etc.) and of luminosity--a theme which Wittgenstein treats in such a way as to destroy the traditional idea that colour is a simple and logically uniform kind of thing.

Towards a Philosophy of Photography


Vilém Flusser - 1983
    An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

What We See When We Read


Peter Mendelsund - 2014
    A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page - a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so - and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved - or reviled - literary figures.In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature - he thinks of himself first, and foremost, as a reader - into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.

Understanding Color: An Introduction for Designers


Linda Holtzschue - 1994
    Learn how to use color more comfortably, creatively, and effectively than ever before. Take your work to the next level by exploring how different light sources affect color rendition, how placement changes colors, how to avoid costly color mistakes, and how to resolve the color problems that frequently confront design professionals. Order your copy today!

The Gift


Lewis Hyde - 1979
    . . . A masterpiece.” —Margaret Atwood“No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” —David Foster WallaceBy now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared.An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.

The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking


Mike Rohde - 2012
    Author Mike Rohde shows you how to incorporate sketchnoting techniques into your note-taking process--regardless of your artistic abilities--to help you better process the information that you are hearing and seeing through drawing, and to actually have fun taking notes. The Sketchnote Handbook explains and illustrates practical sketchnote techniques for taking visual notes at your own pace as well as in real time during meetings and events. Rhode also addresses most people's fear of drawing by showing, step-by-step, how to quickly draw people, faces, type, and simple objects for effective and fast sketchnoting. The book looks like a peek into the author's private sketchnote journal, but it functions like a beginner's guide to sketchnoting with easy-to-follow instructions for drawing out your notes that will leave you itching to attend a meeting just so you can draw about it.

Roy G Biv


Jude Stewart - 2013
    We use it to interpret the world-red means stop, blue means water, orange means construction. But it is also written into our metaphors, of speech and thought alike: yellow means cowardice; green means envy-unless you're in Germany, where yellow means envy, and you can be “beat up green and yellow.”Jude Stewart, a design expert and writer, digs into this rich subject with gusto. What color is the universe? We might say it's black, but astrophysicists think it might be turquoise. Unless it's beige. To read about color from Jude Stewart is to unlock a whole different way of looking at the world around us-and bringing it all vividly to life.The book itself is organized around the rainbow and is lavishly designed, with cross-references that liven up each page. (Follow the thread of imperialism, for example, from the pink-colored colonies on maps of the British Empire to the green wallpaper that might have killed Napoleon.) A lovingly packaged, distinctive book, it will be the only one of its kind.ROY G. BIV is a reference and inspiration for designers and artists, as well as a unique, beautiful, and irresistible book for just about anyone.