From the category archives:

Thought

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

The Designful Company

The Designful Company

Review by David Sherwin
“If you wanna innovate, you gotta design. – Marty Neumeier
From the airy confines of interior design to the tailored minutae of the type designer, the varied disciplines of our profession continue to rush outwards like galaxies fleeing the Big Bang. And the force that drives our profession’s expansion? The universal process we [...]

Read the full article →

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer

(Guest review by Becky Quintal)
‘You only have to see his notes to feel the emotion of the speaker. It is evident that this kind of discourse, even if expressed only in the intimacy of his notebook on the train, reveals a therapeutic aspect of the lecture for someone like Le Corbusier. His life was a [...]

Read the full article →

Designing For People

Designing for People

Guest review by Phillip Hunter
“Design is a silent salesman… contributing not just increased efficiency… but also assurance and confidence.”
So asserts American Industrial Designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904 – 1972) near the beginning of his 1955 memoir, Designing for People (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE). Those characteristics emerge again and again throughout the anecdotes and explanations filling the book. It’s [...]

Read the full article →

The Advertising Concept Book

The Advertising Concept Book

What makes a good ad? What makes an award-winning creative idea? These days its easy to get distracted by fancy art direction and technological novelties, but when you strip all that away, does the idea still stand up?
This is the essence of Pete Barry’s The Advertising Concept Book (Amazon: US|CA|UK|DE) in which you won’t see [...]

Read the full article →

UPPERCASE Magazine

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 [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →