From the category archives:

Thought

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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Glimmer

Glimmer

Review by David Sherwin
The further I’ve progressed in my career as designer, the harder it’s become to share with others exactly what I do.
First, I managed layout at a magazine and bootstrapped a few websites in thrilling Adobe PageMill. Then, within a design studio, I was responsible for creating brands and annual reports—with little [...]

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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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Daniel Eatock – Imprint

Daniel Eatock - Imprint

I have been wanting to write the review of Daniel Eatock’s book, Imprint, (Amazon: US | CA| UK | DE) for some time. It has lain on my desk for weeks and I have delved into it over an over, but the truth is that I have struggled to really work out how to describe [...]

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Camoupedia

Camoupedia

Review by Daniel Gray
Within minutes of picking up Roy R. Behren’s Camoupedia (Amazon link), I was regurgitating fascinating bits of camouflage-related trivia at anyone who would listen, like some kind of third-rate Stephen Fry. Did you know that in 1918, Walt Disney drove an ambulance for the Red Cross, covered not with a standard camouflage [...]

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Design Disasters

Design Disasters

Disasters. We’ve all had them. The wonderful Fail Blog is a daily source of distraction and cautionary tales of idiocy. The #fail Twitter tag turns up a treasure trove of frustrations, usually with bad design or decisions.
I once made a phone number typos on a 20,000 flyer run that went through the letterboxes of everyone [...]

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Designing Web Interfaces

Designing Web Interfaces

Review by David Little
Theresa Neil’s and Bill Scott’s Designing Web Interfaces (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) catalogues and describes seventy five design patterns – solutions to common problems – for building rich interactions on the Web. Not a book about visual design or particular technologies but rather about the whys and hows of interaction design for the Web; or maybe [...]

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Parenthesis – Issue 16

Parenthesis - Issue 16

Okay, I admit it. I expected Parenthesis, the twice-yearly journal of the Fine Book Association to be somewhat boring. I imagined dusty discussions of the nerdy joys of owning crumbling first editions and not a great deal to do with design. How wrong I was.
One of the first articles in Issue 16 is a tribute [...]

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Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories

Card Sorting

Review by Matthew Sanders
Donna Spencer’s debut Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (Amazon US) distills several years experience applying card sorting techniques to web projects into a highly practical guide on card sorting.
Some information architecture books take a general approach and cover a large range of topics in a single book. These books serve an [...]

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