From the category archives:

2D

Jost Hochuli: Detail in Typography

Detail In Typography

Or to give it it’s full title: Detail In Typography, Letters, Letter spacing, words, word spacing, lines, line spacing, columns. (Amazon UK US)

Detail in Typography… is one of the more recent publications by Hyphen Press, the imprint set up by Robin Kinross; typographer, author & critic. Published for the first time in English in [...]

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Talent is Not Enough: Business Secrets for Designers

Thumbnail image for Talent is Not Enough: Business Secrets for Designers

“Long term success requires both creative ability and business acumen.” In one succinct sentence, Shel Perkins gets to the point. Author of Talent is Not Enough: Business Secrets for Designers, Perkins is a design educator, chairman of the AIGA Center for Practice Management, and has more than twenty years of experience managing the operations of [...]

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Graphic Design: A User’s Manual

Graphic Design: A User's Manual

Review by Allen Tan
Graphic Design: A User’s Manual is a book I wish I had when I started out as a designer.
In the follow-up to his previous work, How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, Adrian Shaughnessy focuses less on the nuts and bolts of the studio and is more contemplative, drawing [...]

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Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators & Creatives

Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustraors & Creatives

Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives
Review by Jennifer New
Repository, Incubator, Laboratory, Sketchbook
I had to chuckle when I read DRoB Editor Andy Polaine’s recent take on the creative process his review of Designers Don’t Read:
“Over my own years of writing, I have learned a great deal more about the creative process as a [...]

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The transformer: principles of making Isotype charts by Marie Neurath and Robin Kinross

The Transformer

Transforming (Tranformator) – “The process of analysing, selecting, ordering, and then making visual some information, data, ideas, implications…”
I have been waiting for the publication of The transformer: principles of making Isotype charts (Amazon) for a while now. I first became aware of the Isotype (System Of TYpographic Picture Education) work of Otto [...]

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Design is the Problem

Design is the Problem

Review by David Sherwin
“Would you like a paper or plastic bag for your groceries?”
Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? Paper should be a better choice, because it will biodegrade. Plastic will go on forever in landfills and choke our oceans.

Well, my answer isn’t very well informed. There are major trade-offs in the consumption, [...]

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Fully Booked: Cover Art & Design for Books

Fully Booked

Prepare for this review to become rather meta. Gestalten’s Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Books is a design book about book design also containing six essays, three apiece by Katherine Gillieson and Maria Fusco, one of which is an essay about the difficulty of producing a book on books. Phew.
As with all of [...]

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Designers Don’t Read

Designers Don't Read

I wanted to read Austin Howe’s Designers Don’t Read just to be contrary. I read a great deal, as you might imagine writing these reviews. Indeed, one of the main reasons for starting The Designer’s Review of Books was a complaint about the paucity of writing in many design books. Howe is a Creative Director [...]

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Green Graphic Design

Green Graphic Design

Review by Virginia Sasser
We know that sustainability is an urgent design issue, despite the fact that some of us are tired of mainstream “greenness” blanketing our consumer landscape with tree frogs and leaf icons. But are we as designers aware of all the realistic ecological options that exist in our field? Doing the right thing [...]

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Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

Meggs\’ History of Graphic Design

Review by Patrick Holt
Because the design industry is populated not only by the well-educated, but also by the self-taught and the self-tutored-after-a-mediocre-education (I fall into the latter), it’s likely that many of us missed an opportunity to read Philip Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design (Amazon: US|CA|UK
|DE), now in its fourth edition, during our formative [...]

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