Am I Overthinking This?: Over-answering life's questions in 101 charts


Michelle Rial - 2019
    This is a book of questions with answers, over-answers, and many charts: Did I screw up? How do I achieve work-life balance? Am I eating too much cheese? Do I have too many plants? Like a conversation with your non-judgmental best friend, Michelle Rial delivers a playful take on the little dilemmas that loom large in the mind of every adult through artful charts and funny, insightful questions. • Building on her popular Instagram account @michellerial, Am I Overthinking This? brings whimsical charm to topics big and small• Offers solidarity for the stressed, answers for the confused, and a good laugh for all• Michelle Rial is an illustrator, writer and photographer who has been publishing charts online for almost a decade. Her work has been featured on USA Today, Fast Company, Vox, designboom, AV Club, and more. Fans of Adulting: How to Become a Grownup in 535 Easy(ish) Steps, Thin Slices of Anxiety, and It's OK to Feel Things Deeply will relate to the humorous dilemmas in Am I Overthinking This?This book serves as a reminder that there isn't always one right answer—and that, sometimes, the only answer is to pick a path and keep moving. • A perfect coffee table, bathroom or bar top conversation-starting book• Makes a great gift for a friend who tends to think about the big and small questions a bit too much

1000 Tattoos


Henk Schiffmacher - 1996
    This special 25th anniversary edition of Tattoos explores the history of the art worldwide via designs and photos—from 19th century engravings to tribal body art, from circus ladies of the 20s to classic biker designs—giving a fascinating insight into the art of tattooing.

The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science


Matt LaMothe - 2012
    Inside these pages some of the biggest (and smallest) mysteries of the natural world are explained in essays by real working scientists, which are then illustrated by artists given free rein to be as literal or as imaginative as they like. The result is a celebration of the wonder that inspires every new discovery. Featuring work by such contemporary luminaries as Lisa Congdon, Jen Corace, Neil Farber, Susie Ghahremani, Jeremyville, and many more, this is a work of scientific and artistic exploration to pique the interest of both the intellectually and imaginatively curious.

The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation


Frank Thomas - 1981
    The authors, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, worked with Walt Disney himself as well as other leading figures in a half-century of Disney films. They personally animated leading characters in most of the famous films and have decades of close association with the others who helped perfect this extremely difficult and time-consuming art form. Not to be mistaken for just a "how-to-do-it," this voluminously illustrated volume (like the classic Disney films themselves) is intended for everyone to enjoy.Besides relating the painstaking trial-and-error development of Disney's character animation technology, this book irresistibly charms us with almost an overabundance of the original historic drawings used in creating some of the best-loved characters in American culture: Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Snow White and Bambi (among many, many others) as well as early sketches used in developing memorable sequences from classic features such as Fantasia and Pinocchio. With the full cooperation of Walt Disney Productions and free access to the studio's priceless archives, the authors took unparalleled advantage of their intimate long-term experience with animated films to choose the precise drawings to illustrate their points from among hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork carefully stored away.The book answers everybody's question about how the amazingly lifelike effects of Disney character animation were achieved, including charming stories of the ways that many favorite animated figures got their unique personalities. From the perspective of two men who had an important role in shaping the art of animation, and within the context of the history of animation and the growth of the Disney studio, this is the definitive volume on the work and achievement of one of America's best-known and most widely loved cultural institutions. Nostalgia and film buffs, students of popular culture, and that very broad audience who warmly responds to the Disney "illusion of life" will find this book compelling reading (and looking!).Searching for that perfect gift for the animation fan in your life? Explore more behind-the-scenes stories from Disney Editions:The Art of Mulan: A Disney Editions ClassicWalt Disney's Ultimate Inventor: The Genius of Ub IwerksOne Day at Disney: Meet the People Who Make the Magic Across the GlobeThe Walt Disney Studios: A Lot to RememberFrom All of Us to All of You: The Disney Christmas CardInk & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's AnimationOswald the Lucky Rabbit: The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoons, Revised Special EditionDisney Villains: Delightfully Evil - The Creation, The Inspiration, The FascinationThe Art and Flair of Mary Blair: An Appreciation, Updated Edition

Farm Anatomy: Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life


Julia Rothman - 2011
    Dissecting everything from tractors and pigs to fences, hay bales, crop rotation patterns, and farm tools, Rothman gives a richly entertaining tour of the quirky details of country life. From the shapes of squash varieties to the parts of a goat; from how a barn is constructed to what makes up a beehive, every corner of the barnyard is uncovered and celebrated. A perfect gift for gardeners, locavores, homesteaders, and country-living enthusiasts alike.

Our Rainbow Queen


Sali Hughes - 2019
    Featured in Vanity Fair, New York Post and The Atlantic This riotously colourful book takes a photographic journey through Queen Elizabeth II’s ten decades of colour-blocked style.The photographs, which span the colours of the rainbow and a century of style, are gloriously accessorised with captions and commentary by journalist and broadcaster Sali Hughes.From the dusky pinks the Queen wore in girlhood all the way through to #NeonAt90, by way of that hat she wore on the announcement of Brexit, and not forgetting her trusty Launer handbag ever at her side, this must-have collection celebrates the iconic fashion statements of our longest reigning and most vibrant monarch.

The Works: Anatomy of a City


Kate Ascher - 2005
    When you flick on your light switch the light goes on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?

The New Typography


Jan Tschichold - 1928
    First published in English in 1995, with an excellent introduction by Robin Kinross, this new edition includes a foreword by Rich Hendel, who considers current thinking about Tschichold's life and work.

Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)


Ingrid Schaffner - 2010
    The world as seen through Kalman's eyes is a quirky, slightly off-kilter place as colourful and varied as a kaleidoscope. For decades this brilliant artist has captured our hearts with her whimsical illustrations and engaged our minds with her trenchant observations. A companion to a travelling exhibition, this monograph on Kalman's work features hundreds of paintings, drawings, sketchbook pages, and journal entries as well as rarely glimpsed photographs, stills from performance pieces, and examples of her newest project, embroidery. Kalman was born in Tel Aviv in 1949 and moved to Germany at the age of four. Among her varied body of work are illustrated books for children and adults, clocks she designed with her late husband Tibor Kalman, columns for The Germany Times, fabrics for Maharam and Isaac Mizrahi, and sets for the choreographer Mark Morris. In this book, Kalman offers commentary on her life as an artist, collector, observer, traveller, and maker of lists, while essays by curator Ingrid Schaffner and art historian Kenneth Silver explore her unique gift for distilling the extraordinary from the merely ordinary. From the youngest readers to the most discerning critics, Kalman's many admirers will embrace this wonderful celebration of a life dedicated to making art.

Great Maps


Jerry Brotton - 2014
    From Ptolemy's world map to the Hereford's Mappa Mundi, through Mercator's map of the world to the latest maps of the Moon and Google Earth, Great Maps provides a fascinating overview of cartography through the ages.Revealing the stories behind 55 historical maps by analyzing graphic close-ups, Great Maps also profiles key cartographers and explorers to look why each map was commissioned, who it was for and how they influenced navigation, propaganda, power, art, and politics.

Don't Get a Job… Make a Job: How to Make it as a Creative Gradute (in the fields of Design, Fashion, Architecture, Advertising and more)


Gem Barton - 2016
    But imagine for one moment that there are no employers, no firms to send your resumé to, no interviews to be had—what would you do? How would you forge your own path after graduation?The current economic climate has seen many graduates chasing a finite number of positions. The most ingenious and driven designers have found weird and wonderful ways of making opportunities for themselves, often by applying their skills across the creative disciplines of art, design, architecture, and interiors. Knowing what you want from your design career and being able to adapt your strategy to suit is basic and vital—just like in the wild, designers need to evolve.The book celebrates the various strategies that students and graduates are taking to gain exposure, while also including interviews and inspirational advice from those who are now enjoying success as a result of their creative approach to employment.

Design, Form, and Chaos


Paul Rand - 1993
    Illustrating his ideas with examples of his own graphic work as well as with the work of artists he admires, Rand discusses such topics as: the values on which aesthetic judgements are based; the part played by intuition in good design; the proper relationship between management and designers; the place of market research; how and when to use computers in the production of a design; choosing a typeface; principles of book design; and the thought processes that lead to a final design. The centrepiece of the book consists of seven design portfolios - with working drawings and ultimate choices - that Rand used to present his logos to clients such as Next, The Limited and IBM.

The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization


Alberto Cairo - 2011
    With the right tools, we can start to make sense of all this data to see patterns and trends that would otherwise be invisible to us. By transforming numbers into graphical shapes, we allow readers to understand the stories those numbers hide. In this practical introduction to understanding and using information graphics, you'll learn how to use data visualizations as tools to see beyond lists of numbers and variables and achieve new insights into the complex world around us. Regardless of the kind of data you're working with-business, science, politics, sports, or even your own personal finances-this book will show you how to use statistical charts, maps, and explanation diagrams to spot the stories in the data and learn new things from it.You'll also get to peek into the creative process of some of the world's most talented designers and visual journalists, including Conde Nast Traveler's John Grimwade, National Geographic Magazine's Fernando Baptista, The New York Times' Steve Duenes, The Washington Post's Hannah Fairfield, Hans Rosling of the Gapminder Foundation, Stanford's Geoff McGhee, and European superstars Moritz Stefaner, Jan Willem Tulp, Stefanie Posavec, and Gregor Aisch. The book also includes a DVD-ROM containing over 90 minutes of video lessons that expand on core concepts explained within the book and includes even more inspirational information graphics from the world's leading designers.The first book to offer a broad, hands-on introduction to information graphics and visualization, The Functional Art reveals:- Why data visualization should be thought of as "functional art" rather than fine art - How to use color, type, and other graphic tools to make your information graphics more effective, not just better looking - The science of how our brains perceive and remember information - Best practices for creating interactive information graphics - A comprehensive look at the creative process behind successful information graphics - An extensive gallery of inspirational work from the world's top designers and visual artistsOn the DVD-ROM: In this introductory video course on information graphics, Alberto Cairo goes into greater detail with even more visual examples of how to create effective information graphics that function as practical tools for aiding perception. You'll learn how to: incorporate basic design principles in your visualizations, create simple interfaces for interactive graphics, and choose the appropriate type of graphic forms for your data. Cairo also deconstructs successful information graphics from The New York Times and National Geographic magazine with sketches and images not shown in the book.

Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design


Liz Sanders - 2012
    The book introduces an emerging domain of design that is of immense interest today not only to the academic design research community but also to those in the business community charged with the development of human-centred products, systems, services, and environments. There are no other books with this focus and coverage currently available.

A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives


Lisa Congdon - 2017
    In this richly illustrated volume, bestselling author and artist Lisa Congdon explores the power of women over the age of forty who are thriving and living life on their own terms. Profiles, interviews, and essays from women—including Vera Wang, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Julia Child, Cheryl Strayed, and many more—who've found creative fulfillment and accomplished great things in the second half of their lives are lavishly illustrated and hand-lettered in Congdon's signature style. The perfect gift for women of all ages, A Glorious Freedom celebrates extraordinary lives and redefines what it means to gain wisdom and maturity.