From the category archives:

3D

UPPERCASE Magazine

I am cheating here because UPPERCASE is a magazine and not a book, but rules are made to be broken. How could a web site that bills tags itself with “books for the creative mind” turn down a review of the first issue of a magazine that bills itself as a “magazine for the creative [...]

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Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything.

The car sums up the contradictions of industrialised age more than any other design object. Simultaneously a symbol of desire, design and engineering brilliance and of over-consumption of resources and destruction of the environment. The subtitle to Stephen Bayley’s Cars (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) comes from Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. “Cars mean more to [...]

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Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

(Guest Review by David Sherwin Underwhelmed. We’ve all had this reaction when encountering a product or service that just didn’t cut it. Take, for example, the alarm clock next to my bed. There are two alarm switches side by side: one for me, and one for my wife. Invariably, every morning I hit the wrong [...]

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Designing Design

“Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked. If one brings up an idiosyncratic question, the answer he gives will necessarily be unique as well.” – Kenya Hara, Designing Design. This philosophy is the thread that runs through the entire text of Kenya Hara’s deep and thoughtful book, Designing Design (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE). [...]

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The Design Entrepreneur: Turning Graphic Design into Goods that Sell

Guest review by Colin Ford Clients blow. Designers the world over know this to be the unfortunate truth. Clients come to you for your artistic vision and then try to drag your design back into mediocrity by insisting that 12-point Times New Roman be used for all body copy, or that their second cousin thinks [...]

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Tangible: High Touch Visuals

“Remember the small, cheeky, hand-scribbled notes that were reproduced on a photo or poster design? Those with the simple message: “I was here!” Indicating that someone actually worked with the photo and that these are their thoughts.” – from the Preface to Tangible: High Touch Visuals. In such a digitally dominant world, Gestalten’s new book, [...]

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Designing Gestural Interfaces

Dan Saffer has a knack for writing the right book at the right time. His first book, Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices pulled together various disparate approaches and aspects to interaction design into one volume. “In general, the response has been positive and it is being used by universities and others [...]

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Sizes May Vary: A Workbook for Graphic Design

(Click to enlarge) If you are the kind of person who walks into stationery shop and pauses to inhale the smell of fresh paper or spends hours trying to find the ultimate sketching pens, then you will enjoy opening up Mark Boyce’s book, Sizes May Vary: A Workbook for Graphic Design, published by Laurence King. [...]

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101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Guest Review by Max Gadney Architecture is a discipline that draws together principles typical of many design disciplines – clients, briefs, research, materials, form and function. Added to this mix is permanence, history and scale, which has made architecture arguably one of the most intellectualised design disciplines. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by [...]

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Universal Principles of Design

Reviewed by Rob Tannen. Although Universal Principles of Design was published in 2003, I am embarrassed to admit that I only learned about it several years later via Amazon’s related books feature. Embarrassed, because it is simply the best book I have read on general design and usability principles in terms of both its content [...]

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