Symbol


Angus Hyland - 2011
    Each category includes a short introduction, with expanded captions providing information on who the symbol was designed for, who designed it, when, and where appropriate, what the symbol stands for. These sections are interspersed with short case studies on both classic examples of symbols still in use, and exceptional examples of recently designed symbols.

The Complete Manual of Typography


James Felici - 2002
    Jim Felici brings together a vast amount of knowledge in this book. Must-have!" --Erik Spiekermann, author, Stop Stealing Sheep (and Find Out How Type Works)This book is about how type should look and how to make it look that way; in other words, how to set type like a professional. It releases the craft knowledge that used to reside almost exclusively in the heads of people working in type shops. The shops are gone, the technologies have changed, but the goal remains the same. This book explains in very practical terms how to use today's computerized tools to achieve that secret of good design: well-set type.Beautifully designed and richly illustrated, The Complete Manual of Typography is an essential reference for anyone who works with type. Designers, print production professionals, and corporate communications managers can go straight to the index to find focused answers to specific questions, while educators and students can read it as a textbook from cover to cover. You'll find:History, basic concepts, and anatomy of good typography, concisely presented and indexed for quick reference by busy professionals. Straight-ahead instructions for how to manage fonts, handle corrupted or missing fonts, and find the characters you need. Clear, useful explanations of what makes good type good (and bad type bad) . Detailed guidance on controlling the fundamentals of type, including measure, point size, leading, kerning, and hyphenation and justification. Practical advice on how to fix and avoid composition problems such as loose lines, bad rags, widows and orphans. Hard-to-find rules for managing indents and alignments, skews, wraps, expert-set characters, and tables. Scores of workarounds that show how to wring good type out of uncooperative word-processing and layout programs.

Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field


Helen Armstrong - 2009
    Each beautifully designed, affordable volume offers a concise overview of a design fundamentalthe hows of design. But as most seasoned designers will tell you, a comprehensive education also requires an understanding of the whys of design practice. Graphic Design Theory presents groundbreaking, primary texts from the most important historical and contemporary designthinkers. From Aleksandr Rodchenko's "Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group" to Kenya Hara's "Computer Technology and Design," this essential volume provides the necessary foundation for contemporary critical vocabulary and thought. Graphic Design Theory is organized in three sections: "Creating the Field" traces the evolution of graphic design over the course of the early 1900s, including influential avant-garde ideas of futurism, constructivism, and the Bauhaus; "Building on Success" covers the mid- to late twentieth century and considers the International Style, modernism, and postmodernism; and "Mapping the Future" opens at the end of the last century and includes current discussions on legibility, social responsibility, and new media. Striking color images illustrate each of the movements discussed and demonstrate the ongoing relationship between theory and practice. A brief commentary prefaces each text, providing a cultural and historical framework through which the work can be evaluated. Authors include such influential designers as Herbert Bayer, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Karl Gerstner, Katherine McCoy, Michael Rock, Lev Manovich, Ellen Lupton, and Lorraine Wild. Additional features include a timeline, glossary, and bibliography for further reading. A must-have survey for graduate and undergraduate courses in design history, theory, and contemporary issues, Graphic Design Theory invites designers and interested readers of all levels to plunge into the world of design discourse.

Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information


Manuel Lima - 2011
    Finding patterns and making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. In recent years, designers, researchers, and scientists have begun employing an innovative mix of colors, symbols, graphics, algorithms, and interactivity to clarify, and often beautify, the clutter. From representing networks of friends on Facebook to depicting interactions among proteins in a human cell, Visual Complexity presents one hundred of the most interesting examples of information-visualization by the field's leading practitioners.

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People


Susan M. Weinschenk - 2011
    We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it you'll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play.Learn to increase the effectiveness, conversion rates, and usability of your own design projects by finding the answers to questions such as: What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen?What makes memories stick?What is more important, peripheral or central vision?How can you predict the types of errors that people will make?What is the limit to someone's social circle?How do you motivate people to continue on to (the next step?What line length for text is best?Are some fonts better than others? These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.

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...).

Adobe Photoshop CC Classroom in a Book (2017 Release)


Andrew Faulkner - 2016
    The 15 project-based lessons in this book show users step-by-step the key techniques for working in Photoshop and how to correct, enhance, and distort digital images, create image composites, and prepare images for print and the web. In addition to learning the key elements of the Photoshop interface, this completely revised CC (2017 release) edition covers features like new and improved search capabilities, Content-Aware Crop, Select and Mask, Face-Aware Liquify, designing with multiple artboards, and much more! The online companion files include all the necessary assets for readers to complete the projects featured in each chapter as well as ebook updates when Adobe releases new features for Creative Cloud customers. All buyers of the book get full access to the Web Edition: a Web-based version of the complete ebook enhanced with video and interactive multiple-choice quizzes. As always with the Classroom in a Book, Instructor Notes are available for teachers to download.

Fingerprint: The Art of Using Hand-Made Elements in Graphic Design


Chen Design Associates - 2006
    Our infatuation with—and the backlash against—technology is over. Today's best designers have learned to embrace its advantages and think beyond its limitations by combining the power of the computer with the tactile qualities of handmade elements.Inside you'll find examples of work that showcase a variety of design methods, including mixed media, illustration, letterpress, screenprinting and collage. You'll find inspiration in examples from outstanding designers and see how traditional elements can make a more powerful statement than anesthetized computer-only work. Fingerprint also includes insightful essays on the power of the handmade by Debbie Millman, Jean Orlebeke, Jim Sherraden, Martin Venezky and Ross Macdonald.The projects in this book are beautiful, technical, simple, layered and powerful. Each project communicates its intended message with eloquence.You can be part of this exciting design revolution. Leave your own fingerprint on the world by exploring the fusion of the digital with the hand-wrought.

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity


Julia Cameron - 1992
    An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist’s life. Still as vital today—or perhaps even more so—than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon the impact of The Artist’s Way and describes the work she has done during the last decade and the new insights into the creative process that she has gained. Updated and expanded, this anniversary edition reframes The Artist’s Way for a new century.

50 Modern Artists You Should Know


Christiane Weidemann - 2010
    Starting with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and ending with Matthew Barney, nearly every prominent figure in Modern art is represented in vibrant double-page spreads that show how these artists continued to redefine norms and challenge tradition. Fascinating biographical and anecdotal information about each artist is provided alongside large reproductions of their most celebrated works, stunning details, and images of the artists themselves. A color-coded timeline spans the entire volume, showing overlapping careers and important historical dates. From the impressionists to the surrealists, the cubists to the pop-artists-readers will find a wealth of information as well as hours of enjoyment learning about this popular and prolific period in art history.

Hokusai


Rhiannon Paget - 2018
    Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also a founding father of Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond forms one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of japonisme. His influence spread through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and beyond, enrapturing the likes of Claude Monet (who bought 23 of his prints), Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh. Hokusai was always a man on the move. He changed domicile more than 90 times during his lifetime and changed his own name through at least seven professional pseudonyms. In his art, he adopted the same restlessness, covering the complete spectrum of Japanese ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") practice in painting and woodblock, from single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors to erotic books, album prints, illustrations for verse anthologies and historical novels, and surimono, which were privately issued prints for special occasions. Hokusai's print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published between 1826 and 1833 is the artist's most renowned work and, with its soaring peak through different seasons and from different vantage points, marked the towering summit of the Japanese landscape print. The series' The Great Wave off Kanagawa, also known simply as The Great Wave , is one of the most recognized images of Japanese art in the world. This TASCHEN introduction spans the length and breadth of Hokusai's career with key pieces from his far-reaching portfolio. Through these meticulous, majestic works and series, we trace the variety of Hokusai's subjects, from erotic books to historical novels, and the evolution of his vivid formalism and decisive delineation of space through color and line that would go on to liberate Western art from the constraints of its one-point perspective and unleash the modernist momentum.

Why Is That Art?: Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art


Terry Barrett - 2007
    Introducing students to a variety of established theories of art, he presents the traditional sets of criteria of Realism, Expressionism, and Formalism, which are in turn updated by recent sources of Poststructuralism. Barrett applies each of these theories to challenging works of contemporary art, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each mode of interpretation. He encourages students to consider many criteria when evaluating an artwork, to critically examine judgments made by others, and to make informed judgments of their own. Ideal for courses in aesthetics, art theory, art criticism, and the philosophy of art, Why Is That Art? is organized chronologically according to the history of aesthetics. It features sixty-seven illustrations (twenty-six in a full-color insert), discusses a wide range of American and European artists, and includes an exceptional overview of postmodern pluralism. This unique book will provide students with a newfound appreciation for contemporary art, scholarship, and reasoned argumentation, giving them the confidence to join the fascinating discourse on contemporary art.

The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images


Ami Ronnberg - 2010
    The highly readable texts and over 800 beautiful full-color images come together in a unique way to convey hidden dimensions of meaning. Each of the ca. 350 essays examines a given symbol’s psychic background, and how it evokes psychic processes and dynamics. Etymological roots, the play of opposites, paradox and shadow, the ways in which diverse cultures have engaged a symbolic image—all these factors are taken into consideration.Authored by writers from the fields of psychology, religion, art, literature, and comparative myth, the essays flow into each other in ways that mirror the psyche’s unexpected convergences. There are no pat definitions of the kind that tend to collapse a symbol; a still vital symbol remains partially unknown, compels our attention and unfolds in new meanings and manifestations over time. Rather than merely categorize, The Book of Symbols illuminates how to move from the visual experience of a symbolic image in art, religion, life, or dreams to directly experiencing its personal and psychological resonance.The Book of Symbols sets new standards for thoughtful exploration of symbols and their meanings, and will appeal to a wide range of readers: artists, designers, dreamers and dream interpreters, psychotherapists, self-helpers, gamers, comic book readers, religious and spiritual searchers, writers, students, and anyone curious about the power of archetypal images.

The Natural Way to Draw


Kimon Nicolaides - 1941
    Great for the beginner and the expert, this book offers readers exercises to improve their work.

The Fundamentals of Fashion Design


Richard Sorger - 2006
    Sections include Pattern Construction and Cutting, Fashion Movements, Textiles, Creative Thinking, and Selling Clothes. With exciting visuals and clear text, The Fundamentals of Fashion Design uses detailed diagrams, historical references, and innovative layout to challenge readers to consider the underlying principles of design.