4stars

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Art of the Modern Movie Poster & Translating Hollywood

Art of the Modern Movie Poster & Translating Hollywood

(Guest review by Daniel Gray) As commercial art produced to sell another form of commercial art, film posters can often be crass, repetitive, disposable. They’re just adverts to convince you to sit in a dark room for a couple of hours, right? They’re all about big floating heads, questionable quotes from reviewers, mugging comedians accompanied [...]

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Designing the Mentoring Stamp

Thumbnail image for Designing the Mentoring Stamp

In an age of Twitter, texting, e-mail and barcodes, the humble postage stamp is in danger of dying out. Yet the stamp has been a tiny canvas for artists and designers to disseminate their work to one of the largest and certainly the broadest of audiences for decades. Designing the Mentoring Stamp by Lance Hidy [...]

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Designing Gestural Interfaces

Designing Gestural Interfaces Cover

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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This Rimy River: Vaughn Oliver and Graphic Works 1988-94

Guest review by Tobias Grime This Rimy River: Vaughn Oliver and Graphic Works 1988-94 is probably the most worn out and dog-eared design book I have. And for good reason – since it was published in 1994, it has felt as visually fresh as the day it was produced.

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geometric from Kapitza

[Update: Abduzeedo are giving away a copy of Geometric to the person who leaves the best comment on their site.] If you are thinking of designing and printing your own über cool Christmas wrapping paper, look no further. geometric: graphic art and pattern fonts by Kapitza is, as the title suggests, both a book and [...]

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