Hand Lettering and Contemporary Calligraphy


Lisa Engelbrecht - 2008
    From brides who want to address their wedding invitations to do-it-yourselfers who want to prepare certificates or make a family tree, and even for art journalers and scrapbookers who like creative text in their works, calligraphy books and classes are hot.This new-in-hardcover book will spark the interest of the calligraphy novice by introducing a new approach to lettering, one that combines a lively combination of traditional lettering styles, fun and scripty modern styles, and artsy street-style lettering, along with project ideas that incorporate creative lettering.The book demonstrates the uses of traditional and cutting edge lettering tools, from classic calligraphy pens to bling-producing metallic foils and glue pens. It introduces a wide array of lettering styles with complete alphabets sample artworks that show an application. Fully stepped-out illustrations break down each letterform, taking the reader through each stroke and a large collection of gallery images provides further inspiration for how to use creative lettering in artwork.

Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual


Timothy Samara - 2007
    Unfortunately, when the basic rules of design are ignored in an effort to be distinctive, design becomes useless. In language, a departure from the rules is only appreciated as great literature if recognition of the rules underlies the text. Graphic design is a "visual language," and brilliance is recognized in designers whose work seems to break all the rules, yet communicates its messages clearly.This book is a fun and accessible handbook that presents the fundamentals of design in lists, tips, brief text, and examples. Chapters include Graphic Design: What It Is; What Are They and What Do They Do?; 20 Basic Rules of Good Design; Form and Space-The Basics; Color Fundamentals; Choosing and Using Type; The World of Imagery; Putting it All Together?Essential Layout Concepts; The Right Design Choices: 20 Reminders for Working Designers; and Breaking the Rules: When and Why to Challenge all the Rules of this Book.

Atomic Design


Brad Frost - 2016
    That's a daunting task indeed. Thankfully, design systems are here to help.Atomic Design details all that goes into creating and maintaining robust design systems, allowing you to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before. This book introduces a methodology for thinking of our UIs as thoughtful hierarchies, discusses the qualities of effective pattern libraries, and showcases techniques to transform your team's design and development workflow.

Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids


Beth Tondreau - 2009
    However, knowing how to bend the rules and make certain grids work for the job at hand takes skill.This book will outline and demonstrate basic layout/grid guidelines and rules through 100 entries including choosing the a typeface for the project, striving for rhythm and balance with type, combining typefaces, using special characters and kerning and legibility. These essentials of grid design are critical to the success of any job.

Detail In Typography


Jost Hochuli - 2005
    Hochuli begins with a consideration of how human beings read, moving on incrementally to considerations of letter, word, and line as well as word-space and line-space. Hochuli concludes by examining whole paragraphs and how they carry meaning. Produced in Switzerland to the highest standards, Detail in Typography embodies critical thinking and articulate design in its own physical form.

A Primer of Visual Literacy


Donis A. Dondis - 1973
    The subject is presented, not as a foreign language, but as a native one that the student knows but cannot yet read.Responding to the need she so clearly perceives, Ms. Dondis, a designer and teacher of broad experience, has provided a beginning text for art and design students and a basic text for all other students; those who do not intend to become artists or designers but who need to acquire the essential skills of understanding visual communication at a time when so much information is being studied and transmitted in non-verbal modes, especially through photography and film. Understanding through seeing only seems to be an obviously intuitive process. Actually, developing the visual sense is something like learning a language, with its own special alphabet, lexicon, and syntax. People find it necessary to be verbally literate whether they are writers: or not; they should find it equally necessary to be visually literate, artists or not. This primer is designed to teach students the interconnected arts of visual communication. The subject is presented, not as a foreign language, but as a native one that the student knows but cannot yet read. The analogy provides a useful teaching method, in part because it is not overworked or too rigorously applied. This method of learning to see and read visual data has already been proved in practice, in settings ranging from Harlem to suburbia. Appropriately, the book makes some of its most telling points through visual means. Numerous illustrated examples are employed to clarify the basic elements of design (teach an alphabet), to show how they are used in simple syntactic combinations (See Jane run.), and finally, to present the meaningful synthesis of visual information that is a finished work of art (the apprehension of poetry...).

Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World


David B. Berman - 2008
    How does design help choose our leaders?Why do we"really"have an environmental crisis?How can accessible design broaden your audience?Why does the U.S. economy now struggle to compete?How has design thinking added to the bottom line of the world s most valuable companies? Design matters. As it never has before. Design creates so much of what we see, what we use, and what we experience. In a time of unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises, designers must now choose what their young profession will be about: deploying weapons of mass deception or helping repair the world. "Do Good Design"is a call to action: This book alerts us to the role design plays in persuading global audiences to fulfill invented needs. The book then outlines a sustainable approach to both the practice and the consumption of design. All professionals will be inspired by the message of how we can feel better and do better while holding onto our principles. In a time when anything has become possible, design thinking offers a way forward for us all. What will you do? "

The Little Black Book of Design


Adam Judge - 2009
    Like an Art of War for design, this slim volume contains guidance, inspiration, and reassurance for all those who labor with the user in mind. If you work on the web, in print, or in film or video, this book can help. If you know someone working on the creative arena, this makes a great gift. Funny, too.Look for fresh aphorisms on our Facebook page.

Interaction of Color


Josef Albers - 1971
    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

Graphic Design Rules: 365 Essential Design Dos and Don'ts


Sean Adams - 2012
    Every creative has their own individual approach, or more importantly their own combinations of the thousands of techniques one can apply when planning a new design project. But there are some dos and don'ts that always figure strongly in any heated debate about what one should or should not accept as the right way to create the best graphic design. Packed with practical advice but presented in a light-hearted fashion, Graphic Design Rules is the perfect book for the ever-growing group of non-designers who want some graphic design guidance.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form


Christopher W. Alexander - 1964
    He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional un-self-conscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities.In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct.The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.

The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication


Ruben Pater - 2016
    With communication comes responsibility; are designers aware of the meaning and impact of their work? An image or symbol that is acceptable in one culture can be offensive or even harmful in the next. A typeface or colour in a design might appear to be neutral, but its meaning is always culturally dependent. If designers learn to be aware of global cultural contexts, we can avoid stereotyping and help improve mutual understanding between people.Politics of Design is a collection of visual examples from around the world. Using ideas from anthropology and sociology, it creates surprising and educational insight in contemporary visual communication. The examples relate to the daily practice of both online and offline visual communication: typography, images, colour, symbols, and information.Politics of Design shows the importance of visual literacy when communicating beyond borders and cultures. It explores the cultural meaning behind the symbols, maps, photography, typography, and colours that are used every day. It is a practical guide for design and communication professionals and students to create more effective and responsible visual communication.

Laws of UX: Design Principles for Persuasive and Ethical Products


Jon Yablonski - 2020
    Instead of forcing users to conform to a product design or experience, designers need to learn how users behave and interact with various digital interfaces.This guide provides some key principles from psychology to help you design more intuitive, human-centered products and experiences. Humans have an underlying blueprint for how we perceive and process the world around us, and through simple lessons in psychology, this guide will help you define this blueprint.

Tragic Design: The True Impact of Bad Design and How to Fix It


Jonathan Shariat - 2016
    In this thought-provoking book, authors Jonathan Shariat and Cynthia Savard Saucier explain how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them. The designers responsible certainly didn't intend harm, so what can you do to avoid making similar mistakes?Tragic Design examines real case studies that show how certain design choices adversely affected users, and includes in-depth interviews with authorities in the design industry. Pick up this book and learn how you can be an agent of change in the design community and at your company.You'll explore:Designs that can kill, including the bad interface that doomed a young cancer patientDesigns that anger, through impolite technology and dark patternsHow design can inadvertently cause emotional painDesigns that exclude people through lack of accessibility, diversity, and justiceHow to advocate for ethical design when it isn't easy to do soTools and techniques that can help you avoid harmful design decisionsInspiring professionals who use design to improve our world

Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices


Dan Saffer - 2008
    Nintendo's Wii and Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch have made gestural interfaces popular, but until now there's been no complete source of information about the technology.Designing Gestural Interfaces provides you with essential information about kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns -- all you need to know to augment your existing skills in "traditional" web design, software, or product development. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, this book helps you:Get an overview of technologies surrounding touchscreens and interactive environments Learn the process of designing gestural interfaces, from documentation to prototyping to communicating to the audience what the product does Examine current patterns and trends in touchscreen and gestural design Learn about the techniques used by practicing designers and developers today See how other designers have solved interface challenges in the past Look at future trends in this rapidly evolving field Only six years ago, the gestural interfaces introduced in the film Minority Report were science fiction. Now, because of technological, social, and market forces, we see similar interfaces deployed everywhere. Designing Gestural Interfaces will help you enter this new world of possibilities.