Thankfully we now have the place to go.Jon Hicks' 'The Icon Handbook' will become the go-to book for the modern designer; for uncovering the thought processes, the skills and the reference for designing your own icons.This book is aimed at designers who already have basic vector and bitmap drawing skills. It could be that you want to create a simple, unique favicon, or perhaps you've been asked to work on a mobile app that requires them. It starts at the basics and takes you right the way through to being able to create stunning iconography.

    Strangling economies with their austerity policies, they assure us that they have no choice. In a world where “there is no alternative”, how do you dissent? Once upon a time, graphic designers would have made political posters and typeset manifestos. Today, protest has new strategies. Enter the internet meme. With its Darwinian survival skills and its viral potential, the meme is a way of scaling up protest. Hackers and activists have learned to unleash the destructive force of a Rick Astley video. They have let slip the Lolcats of war. Pranks have become a resistance strategy. As the rise of Beppe Grillo in Italy testifies, this may be the hour to fight nonsense with nonsense. Jokes are an open-source weapon of politics, and it is time to tap their power.

    Aimed principally at the student market, the book shows where ideas and inspiration come from and helps unlock the reader s creativity, providing numerous strategies to help solve creative briefs and design problems. Using an upbeat, dynamic and easy-to-understand A Z format, the book reveals techniques that can be exploited to deliver ideas with greater impact, with each entry offering a different starting point. Entries include everything from Intuition and Instinct to Happy Accidents and Hidden Messages, and feature a section explaining how to use the idea or technique, providing readers with an infallible tool kit of inspiration. Including hundreds of inspirational quotes from creative people and packed with great examples of advertising campaigns, posters, book and magazine covers, illustrations and editorial images, this indispensable creative primer also includes previously unpublished photographic work.

    Featuring more than 1,300 international typographic identities, by around 250 design studios, this is an indispensable handbook for every design studio, providing a valuable resource to draw on in branding and corporate identity projects. Retaining the striking black-and-white aesthetic and structure of Logo (also by Michael Evamy) and Symbol, Logotype is an important and essential companion volume.

    This is it. Don't Call It That is a step-by-step workbook that will guide you through the naming process. A Hundred Monkeys Creative Director, Eli Altman, will help you develop attention grabbing names that speak to your audience and establish the seed of your brand. The book is like that friend who isn't afraid to tell you what you need to hear. It'll help you understand what's at stake and how to approach naming creatively without neglecting practical realities like positioning, trademarks and URLs. How do you find a name that's available? How do you find a name that grabs people's attention? How do you tell the difference between a good name and a bad name? How do you test names in the real world? How do you find a name that elevates you above the competition Don't Call It That will set you straight.

    This is a master class in the principles and practical fundamentals of design that will appeal to a broad audience of graphic artists and designers.

    Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer's block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In this book, Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, maker, writer, and architect to describe the workings of the creative process.Leski sees the creative process as being like a storm; it slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us--if we are willing to let it. It is dynamic, continually in motion; it starts, stops, rages and abates, ebbs and flows. In illustrations that accompany each chapter, she maps the arc of the creative process by tracing the path of water droplets traveling the stages of a storm.Leski describes unlearning, ridding ourselves of preconceptions; only when we realize what we don't know can we pose the problem that we need to solve. We gather evidence--with notebook jottings, research, the collection of objects--propelling the process. We perceive and conceive; we look ahead without knowing where we are going; we make connections. We pause, retreat, and stop, only to start again. To illustrate these stages of the process, Leski draws on examples of creative practice that range from Paul Klee to Steve Jobs, from the discovery of continental drift to the design of Antoni Gaud�'s Sagrada Familia.Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end; it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery.The Creative ProcessUnlearningProblem MakingGathering and TrackingPropellingPerceiving and ConceivingSeeing AheadConnectingPausingContinuing

    You'll be guided through the entire process of creating a gorgeous, usable web site by applying the timeless principles of user-centered design.Even if you're short on design skills, with this book you'll be creating your own stunning web sites in no time at all.Throughout, the focus is on simple and practical techniques that anyone can use - you don't need to have gone to art school or have artistic flair to create stunning designs using the methods outlined in this book.The book's full-color layout and large format (8" x 10") make Sexy Web Design a pleasure to read.Master key web interface design principles Design amazing web interfaces from scratch Create beautiful, yet functional, web sites Unleash your artistic talents And much more Who should read this book? Whether you're completely new to web design, a seasoned pro looking for inspiration, or a developer wanting to improve your sites' aesthetics, there's something for everyone here.How? Because instead of trying to cover every possible area of creating a web site, we've focused purely on the design stage; that is, everything that happens before a single line of code is written.However, great design is more than just aesthetics. Long before we open our graphics program of choice, we'll be conducting research, dealing with clients, responding to briefs, sketching out sitemaps, planning information architecture, moving from doodles to diagrams, exploring different ways of interactivity, and building upon design traditions.But ultimately, you'll be finding out how to create web sites that look drop-dead gorgeous.

    Today, more and more graphic designers, advertising agencies, motion designers, and artists work in this area. New techniques and forms of expression are being developed. Consequently, the demand for information on this topic has grown enormously. Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. The book features new possibilities for diagrams, maps, and charts. It investigates the visual and intuitive presentation of processes, data, and information. Concrete examples of research and art projects as well as commercial work illuminate how techniques such as simplification, abstraction, metaphor, and dramatization function. The book also includes interviews with experts such as The New York Times s Steve Duenes, Infosthetics's Andrew Vande Moere, Visualcomplexity's Manuel Lima, ART+COM's Joachim Sauter, and passionate cartographer Menno-Jan Kraak as well as text features by Johannes Schardt about the challenges in creating effective information graphics and about the relationship between complexity, clarity, content, and innovation. Offering practical advice, background information, case studies, and inspiration, Data Flow 2 is a valuable reference for anyone working with or interested in information graphics.

    Whether you’re enraged by Ikea’s Verdanagate, want to know what the Beach Boys have in common with easy Jet or why it’s okay to like Comic Sans, Just My Type will have the answer. Learn why using upper case got a New Zealand health worker sacked. Refer to Prince in the Tafkap years as a Dingbat (that works on many levels). Spot where movies get their time periods wrong and don’t be duped by fake posters on eBay. Simon Garfield meets the people behind the typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts – like men – are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers, to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.

    These optimistic indicators paint a fascinating picture of the colorful capitalism that dominated the spirit of the 1950s and 60s, as concerns about the Cold War gave way to the carefree booze-and-cigarettes Mad Men era. Also included is a wide range of significant advertising campaigns from both eras, giving insight into the zeitgeist of the period. Bursting with fresh, crisp colors, these ads have been digitally mastered to look as bright and new as the day they first hit newsstands.

    Set out in A-Z style and written in a realistic, conversational, and insightful way, the book provides advice on the fundamental topics and issues that face designers in their daily lives. It looks at everything from kerning to presenting, from budgeting to dealing with rejection, from annual reports to interface design. Adrian Shaughnessy, author of the best-selling How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, is himself a successful designer, and brings a wealth of experience to this very useful and entertaining book.

    Master this challenge with professional photographer Lee Varis as he covers a range of skin: women and men, young and old, various tones, in-studio and outdoors, tattoos, and more. His step-by-step tutorials and before-and-after illustrations demonstrate various techniques for topics such as digital-specific lighting challenges and what can and cannot be done in post-process. A free CD-ROM accompanies the book and contains sample image files to use while following the tutorials, plus equipment recommendations and technical reference materials that enhance and reinforce the instruction. Order your copy of this practical guide today and get a complete start-to-finish approach to integrating everything from posing models to shooting and retouching candid scenes.

    A brief history is given of the origins of the trademark in heraldry, monograms, owner's marks and certificates of origin. The proceeding chapters explore corporate identity and communication design with an emphasis on sign theory. The core of the book is a comprehensive classification of trademarks covering name marks, abbreviations and all kinds of picture marks. This is followed by an alphabetical index of trademark themes from animals to word puzzles. The index is illustrated by a selection of the world's best trademarks - the marks of excellence from which this book takes its name. The final section of the book covers the development of trademarks over time and across the boundaries of language and space.

    Summary boxes make it ideal for revision and reference.