Graphic Design Cookbook: Mix & Match Recipes for Faster, Better Layouts
Leonard Koren - 1989
Now released with a fresh new cover, its more than a thousand line drawings illustrate effective design devices, type treatments, spatial solutions, and pictorial presentations, allowing examination and comparison of various options in no time. The Graphic Design Cookbook can be opened to virtually any page for instant access to great ideas. As a catalyst for cooking up endless new design recipes, this classic goes on inspiring one generation of designers to the next.
How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul
Adrian Shaughnessy - 2005
How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul addresses the concerns of young designers who want to earn a living by doing expressive and meaningful work, and who want to avoid becoming hired drones working on soulless projects. Written by a designer for designers, it combines practical advice with philosophical guidance to help young professionals embark on their careers. How should designers manage the creative process? What's the first step in the successful interpretation of a brief? How do you generate ideas when everything just seems blank? How to be a graphic designer offers clear, concise guidance for these questions, along with focused, no-nonsense strategies for setting up, running, and promoting a studio, finding work, and collaborating with clients.The book also includes inspiring interviews with ten leading designers, including Rudy VanderLans (Emigre), John Warwicker (Tomato), Neville Brody (Research Studios), and Andy Cruz (House Industries). All told, How to be a graphic designer covers just about every aspect of the profession, and stands as an indispensable guide for any young designer.
The Best Interface Is No Interface: The simple path to brilliant technology
Golden Krishna - 2015
We've embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom.Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some "technological innovators" are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter.Are you sick? There's an app for that! Need to pray? There's an app for that! Dead? Well, there's an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic.There's a better way.In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces.In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you're working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you'll be enlighted and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer
Debbie Millman - 2007
How do they think, how do they connect to others, what special skills do they have? In honest and revealing interviews, nineteen designers, including Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Beirut, David Carson, and Milton Glaser, share their approaches, processes, opinions, and thoughts about their work with noted brand designer Debbie Millman. The internet radio talk host of Design Matters, Millman persuades the greatest graphic designers of our time to speak frankly and openly about their work. How to Think Like a Great GraphicDesigners offers a rare opportunity to observe and understand the giants of the industry. Designers interviewed include: —Milton Glaser —Stefan Sagmeister —David Carson —Paula Scher —Abbott Miler —Lucille Tenazas —Paul Sahre —Emily Oberman and Bonnie Siegler —Chip Kidd —James Victore —Carin Goldberg —Michael Bierut —Seymour Chwast —Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel —Steff Geissbuhler —John MaedaAllworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Dan Roam - 2008
Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers. Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply “get”. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw. Drawing on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries of vision science, this book shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools – tools that take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN proves that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights. This book will help readers literally see the world in a new way.
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? "
Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity
Felicia Day - 2019
Including Felicia’s personal stories and hard-won wisdom, Embrace Your Weird offers: —Entertaining and revelatory exercises that empower you to be fearless, so you can rediscover the things that bring you joy, and crack your imagination wide open —Unique techniques to vanquish enemies of creativity like: anxiety, fear, procrastination, perfectionism, criticism, and jealousy —Tips to cultivate a creative community —Space to explore and get your neurons firing Whether you enjoy writing, baking, painting, podcasting, playing music, or have yet to uncover your favorite creative outlet, Embrace Your Weird will help you unlock the power of self-expression. Get motivated. Get creative. Get weird.
Design Thinking Methodology Book
Emrah Yayici - 2016
It includes easily applicable design thinking techniques, such as - HMW questions, - personas, - mind mapping - empathy mapping, - affinity diagram, - value-proposition canvas, - storyboard, - cause-and-effect diagram, - brainstorming, - brain dumps, - reverse brainstorming, - benchmarking, - journey map, and - prototyping. A real-life case study is used to introduce design thinking methodology and techniques in a more practical way to a broad range of practitioners, including - project managers and IT specialists, - innovation teams, - marketing professionals and brand managers, - product managers, - designers, - consultants, - strategic planning experts, - entrepreneurs, - C-level executives, and architects. The book explains how artful thinking perspectives can be applied to enhance design thinking skills, such as - creativity, - thinking out of the box, - empathy, - visual thinking, - observation, - asking the right questions, and - pattern recognition. It also describes how to apply design thinking and lean and agile methodologies together.
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.
Hello World: Where Design Meets Life
Alice Rawsthorn - 2012
When deployed wisely, it can bring us pleasure, choice, strength, decency and much more. But if its power is abused, the outcome can be wasteful, confusing, humiliating, even dangerous. None of us can avoid being affected by design, whether or not we wish to. It is so ubiquitous that it determines how we feel and what we do, often without our noticing.Hello World explores design's influence on our lives. Written by the renowned design critic Alice Rawsthorn and designed by the award-winning book designer Irma Boom, it describes how warlords, scientists, farmers, hackers, activists and designers have used design to different ends throughout history: from the macabre symbol invented by 18th century pirates to terrorise their victims into surrender, to one woman's quest for the best possible prosthetic legs and the evolution of the World Cup ball.At a time when we face colossal changes, unprecedented in their speed, scale and intensity - from the deepening environmental crisis, to giant leaps in science and technology - Hello World explains how design can help us to make sense of them andto turn them to our advantage.
Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love
Jon Kolko - 2014
But in a world obsessed with the new, where cool added features often trump actual customer needs, it’s the consumer who suffers. In our quest to be more agile, we end up creating products that underwhelm.So how does a company like Nest, creator of the mundane thermostat, earn accolades like “beautiful” and “revolutionary” and a $3.2 billion Google buyout? What did Nest do differently to create a household product that people speak of with love?Nest, and companies like it, understand that emotional connection is critical to product development. And they use a clear, repeatable design process that focuses squarely on consumer engagement rather than piling on features for features’ sake.In this refreshingly jargon-free and practical book, product design expert Jon Kolko maps out this process, demonstrating how it will help you and your team conceive and build successful, emotionally resonant products again and again.The key, says Kolko, is empathy. You need to deeply understand customer needs and feelings, and this understanding must be reflected in the product. In successive chapters of the book, we see how leading companies use a design process of storytelling and iteration that evokes positive emotions, changes behavior, and creates deep engagement. Here are the four key steps:1. Determine a product-market fit by seeking signals from communities of users.2. Identify behavioral insights by conducting ethnographic research.3. Sketch a product strategy by synthesizing complex research data into simple insights.4. Polish the product details using visual representations to simplify complex ideas.Kolko walks the reader through each step, sharing eye-opening insights from his fifteen-year career in product design along the way.Whether you’re a designer, a product developer, or a marketer thinking about your company’s next offering, this book will forever change the way you think about—and create—successful products.
Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
Jeff Gothelf - 2012
In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomesBring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product teamShare your insights with your team much earlier in the processCreate Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are validIncorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycleMake your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum frameworkUnderstand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UXLean UX received the 2013 Jolt Award from Dr. Dobb's Journal as the best book of the year. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
Kat Holmes - 2018
Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods--designing objects with rather than for excluded users--can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. A gamer and designer who depends on voice recognition shows Holmes his "Wall of Exclusion," which displays dozens of game controllers that require two hands to operate; an architect shares her firsthand knowledge of how design can fail communities, gleaned from growing up in Detroit's housing projects; an astronomer who began to lose her eyesight adapts a technique called "sonification" so she can "listen" to the stars.Designing for inclusion is not a feel-good sideline. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies. It can be a catalyst for creativity and a boost for the bottom line as a customer base expands. And each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we create an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways.
You Are a Circle
Guillaume Wolf - 2012
This voyage is made of mysterious circles and zen-like aphorisms that feel like the voice of an old friend. A mesmerizing experience, YOU ARE A CIRCLE is the perfect companion for the creative mind. It’s a timeless book that will inspire you for the years to come.
UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein - 2013
With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.Determine whether people will buy your product before you build itListen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycleUnderstand why you should design a test before you design a productGet nine tools that are critical to designing your productDiscern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-havesLearn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisionsUse A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practicesSpeed up your product development process without sacrificing quality