Origami Omnibus: Paper Folding for Everybody


Kunihiko Kasahara - 1988
    With more than 250 projects of many different types and levels of difficulty, this bestselling, encyclopedic work contains traditional and modern paper-folding methods, and includes folds for the beginner and works calculated to challenge the experts.

Wood Work: A Step-By-Step Photographic Guide to Successful Woodworking


Alan Bridgewater - 2010
    From carving and veneering to jewelry boxes and custom cabinetry, "Woodwork" is the ultimate visual guide to every essential woodworking technique.Featuring an attractive range of finely crafted projects in easy-to-follow step-by-step detail, from household items to furniture, "Woodwork" is an inspiring book for woodworking enthusiasts who want to develop their skills, whether a beginner or more advanced woodworker.

Domino: The Book of Decorating: A Room-by-Room Guide to Creating a Home That Makes You Happy


Deborah Needleman - 2008
    The editors take readers room by room, tapping the best ideas from domino magazine and culling insights from their own experiences. With an eye to making design accessible and exciting, this book demystifies the decorating process and provides the tools for making spaces that are personal, functional and fabulous.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming


Anthony Dunne - 2013
    In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be--to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more--about everything--reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design/Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung


Josef Müller-Brockmann - 1996
    "Grid Systems in Graphic Design - Raster Systeme für die Visuelle Gestaltung" By Josef Müller-Brockmann. English version by D. Q. Stephenson. English and German text. This is the 5th Edition, published by Verlag Niggli AG, 2007. Full title: "Grid Systems in Graphic Design. A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers - Raster Systeme für die Visuelle Gestaltung. Ein Handbuch für Grafiker, Typografen und Ausstellungsgestalter". A comprehensive handbook on modern typography and using the Grid System, illustrated with drawings, diagrams, black & white photographs & numerous examples of graphic design. Subjects include: Grid and Design Philosophy; The Typographic Grid and its purpose; Sizes of Paper; Typeface Alphabets; Margin Proportions; Construction of the Grid and Type Area; Type & Picture Area with 8, 20 and 32 Grid Fields; Photograph & Illustration in the Grid System; the Grid in Corporate Identity and Three-Dimensional Design & more.

Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design


Vilém Flusser - 1993
    It puts forward the view that our future depends on design. In a series of insightful essays on such ordinary "things" as wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas and tents, Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture. Just as formal creativity has produced both weapons of destruction and great works of art, Flusser believed that the shape of things (and the designs behind them) represents both a threat and an opportunity for designers of the future.

Design Meets Disability


Graham Pullin - 2009
    This revolution has come about through embracing the design culture of the fashion industry. Why shouldn't design sensibilities also be applied to hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, and communication aids? In return, disability can provoke radical new directions in mainstream design. Charles and Ray Eames's iconic furniture was inspired by a molded plywood leg splint that they designed for injured and disabled servicemen. Designers today could be similarly inspired by disability.In Design Meets Disability, Graham Pullin shows us how design and disability can inspire each other. In the Eameses' work there was a healthy tension between cut-to-the-chase problem solving and more playful explorations. Pullin offers examples of how design can meet disability today. Why, he asks, shouldn't hearing aids be as fashionable as eyewear? What new forms of braille signage might proliferate if designers kept both sighted and visually impaired people in mind? Can simple designs avoid the need for complicated accessibility features? Can such emerging design methods as "experience prototyping" and "critical design" complement clinical trials?Pullin also presents a series of interviews with leading designers about specific disability design projects, including stepstools for people with restricted growth, prosthetic legs (and whether they can be both honest and beautifully designed), and text-to-speech technology with tone of voice. When design meets disability, the diversity of complementary, even contradictory, approaches can enrich each field.

The Elements of Color


Johannes Itten - 1961
    The Art of Color, this book covers subjective feeling and objective color principles in detail. It presents the key to understanding color in ltten's color circle and color contrasts.

The Elements of Typographic Style


Robert Bringhurst - 1992
    Combining practical, theoretical, and historical, this book is a must for graphic artists, editors, or anyone working with the printed page using digital or traditional methods.Having established itself as a standard in its field The Elements of Typographic Style is house manual at most American university presses, a standard university text, and a reference work in studios of designers around the world. It has been translated into italian and greek, and dutch.

The Vignelli Canon


Massimo Vignelli - 2010
    He uses numerous examples to convey applications in practice - from product design via signaletics and graphic design to Corporate Design. By doing this he is making an important manual available to young designers that in its clarity both in terms of subject matter and visually is entirely committed to Vignelli's modern design.

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.

Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop


Timothy Samara - 2003
    Effective layout is essential to communication and enables the end user not only to be drawn in with an innovative design but to digest information easily. Making and Breaking the Grid is a comprehensive layout design workshop that assumes that in order to effectively break the rules of grid-based design, one must first understand those rules and see them applied in real-world projects.Text reveals top designers' work in process and rationale. Projects with similar characteristics are linked through a simple notational system that encourages exploration and comparison of structure ideas. Also included are historical overviews that summarize the development of layout concepts, both grid-based and non-grid based, in modern design practice.

The Urban Sketching Handbook Architecture and Cityscapes: Tips and Techniques for Drawing on Location


Gabriel Campanario - 2014
    Now, he drills down into specific challenges of making sketches on location, rain or shine, quickly or slowly, and the most suitable techniques for every situation, in The Urban Sketching Handbook series. It's easy to overlook that ample variety of buildings and spaces and the differences from city to city, country to country. From houses, apartments and shopping malls to public buildings and places of worship, the structures humans have created over the centuries, for shelter, commerce, industry, transportation or recreation, are fascinating subjects to study and sketch.In The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes, Gabriel lays out keys to help make the experience of drawing architecture and cityscapes fun and rewarding. Using composition, depth, scale, contrast, line and creativity, sketching out buildings and structure has never been more inspirational. This guide will help you to develop your own creative approach, no matter what your skill level may be today. As much as The Urban Sketching Handbook: Architecture and Cityscapes may inspire you to draw more urban spaces, it can also help to increase your appreciation of the built environment. Drawing the places where we live, work and play, is a great way to show appreciation and creativity.

101 Things I Learned in Engineering School


John Kuprenas - 2013
    Far from a dry, nuts-and-bolts exposition, however, 101 THINGS I LEARNED® IN ENGINEERING SCHOOL probes real-world examples to show how the engineer's way of thinking can-and sometimes cannot-inform our understanding of how things work. Questions from the simple to the profound are illuminated throughout: Why shouldn't soldiers march across a bridge? Why do buildings want to float and cars want to fly? What is the difference between thinking systemically and thinking systematically? How can engineering solutions sympathize with the natural environment? Presented in the familiar, illustrated format of the popular 101 THINGS I LEARNED® series, 101 THINGS I LEARNED® IN ENGINEERING SCHOOL offers an informative resource for students, general readers, and even experienced engineers, who will discover within many provocative new insights into familiar principles.

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.