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"In the 21st century, graphic designers throughout the world are facing tough but exciting challenges: new technologies, new ways for clients to interact with customers, and an audience that is increasingly literate when it comes to design, global influences, and cultures. This book starts by exploring the issues that shape design today : sustainability, ethics, technology, theory, and developments in other fields that impact globally on local cultures. [This book] breaks the discipline down into its elements. The book examines traditional practices such as typography, signage, advertising, and book design, as well as more recent developments including VJing, games design, software design, and interactive design. There is no single ideal for how a designer should be: a designer can practice along or be part of a large group ; a designer can also write, edit, curate, take photographs, design typefaces, and be an entrepreneur. This book concludes with a showcase of the work of cutting-edge designers from many parts of the world."--Page 4 of cover.
How product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill. Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths through condemnation or indifference. When a designed product's usefulness is past, the public happily discards it to make room for the next new thing. Criticism rarely deals with how a product might be used, or not used, over time; it is more likely to play the enabler, encouraging our addiction to consumption. With Sifting the Trash, Alice Twemlow offers an especially timely reexamination of the history of product design criticism through t...
What should Lolita look like? The question has dogged book-cover designers since 1955, when Lolita was first published in a plain green wrapper. The heroine of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel has often been shown as a teenage seductress in heart-shaped glasses--a deceptive image that misreads the book but has seeped deep into our cultural life, from fashion to film. Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators (including Paula Scher, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Peter Mendelsund) offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov sch...
According to the Museum, "This retrospective will focus not only on objects and installations but also on the creative process and mental world of Studio Formafantasma. The title of the exhibition refers to alchemy: the transformation of everyday raw materials into precious goods. Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin do something similar as designers. An extensive research and work process results in products and installations that raise questions about the role of industry, globalisation and sustainability."
The first book to be published on the work of their partnership (in 2001), Design Noir is the essential primary source for understanding the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings for Dunne & Raby's work. Consisting of three elements - a 'manifesto' on the possibilities of designing with and for the 'secret life' of electronic objects; notes for an embryonic network of critical designers and, most famously, the presentation of the Placebo Project – a prototype for a critical design poetics enacted around electronic furniture-objects – Design Noir offers an in-depth exploration of one of the most seminal design projects of the last two decades, one that arguably initiated speculating th...
Explains how important language is to understanding design, how a range of texts - from design criticism to instructions and labels - shape the appreciation and use of design.
FOREWORD BY ELLEN LUPTON Critiqued takes you on a journey with designer Christina Beard through an iterative design experiment. With her poster in tow, she meets with leading designers, writers, and curators. At each stop, the participant critiques the poster and talks about his or her own design process. Based on their conversation, Christina redesigns the poster before heading to the next critique — a process similar to the children’s game telephone. This book is not about learning new software or being told how to do something — it’s about exploring and discovering an approach to design that works for you. The experiment is presented as part memoir and part interview and gives readers insight into each designer’s process and personality. Each chapter features a design prompt for readers to explore 23 distinct approaches in design and to compare multiple perspectives. Visit the companion website for additional information: http://critiquedthebook.com/
Domestic advice literature is rich in information about design, ideals of domesticity, consumption and issues of identity, yet this literature remains a relatively neglected resource in comparison with magazines and film. Design at Home brings together etiquette, homemaking and home decoration advice as sources in the first systematic demonstration of the historical value of domestic advice literature as a genre of word and image, and a discourse of dominance. This book traces a transatlantic domestic dialogue between the UK and the US as the chapters explore issues of design, domesticity, consumption, social interaction and identity markers including class, gender and age. Areas covered include: • the use of domestic advice by historians • relationships between advice, housing and the middle class • links between advice and gender • advice and the teenage consumer Design at Home is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural and social history, design history, and cultural studies.
Graphic Design, Referenced is a visual and informational guide to the most commonly referenced terms, historical moments, landmark projects, and influential practitioners in the field of graphic design. With more than 2,000 design projects illustrating more than 400 entries, it provides an intense overview of the varied elements that make up the graphic design profession through a unique set of chapters: “principles" defines the very basic foundation of what constitutes graphic design to establish the language, terms, and concepts that govern what we do and how we do it, covering layout, typography, and printing terms; “knowledge" explores the most influential sources through which we le...
The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays that have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, includes one never-before-published piece on the world of electronics. The essays celebrate the joy--and exquisite details--of everything from library card catalogs and reading aloud to the significance of wine stains on a tablecloth. Baker turns any subject, from feeding a child to phone sex, into literature with a style that is sparklingly original, frequently beautiful, and always thought-provoking. The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of out time.