Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design


Book Description

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.




Now You See It and Other Essays on Design


Book Description

"Design is a way to engage with real content, real experience," writes celebrated essayist Michael Bierut in this follow-up to his best-selling Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (2007). In more than fifty smart and accessible short pieces from the past decade, Bierut engages with a fascinating and diverse array of subjects. Essays range across design history, practice, and process; urban design and architecture; design hoaxes; pop culture; Hydrox cookies, Peggy Noonan, baseball, The Sopranos; and an inside look at his experience creating the "forward" logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Other writings celebrate such legendary figures as Jerry della Femina, Alan Fletcher, Charley Harper, and his own mentor, Massimo Vignelli. Bierut's longtime work in the trenches of graphic design informs everything he writes, lending depth, insight, and humor to this important and engrossing collection.




How Buildings Learn


Book Description

A captivating exploration of the ever-evolving world of architecture and the untold stories buildings tell. When a building is finished being built, that isn’t the end of its story. More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they’re allowed to. Buildings adapt by being constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and in that way, architects can become artists of time rather than simply artists of space. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei’s Media Lab, from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory. Discover how structures become living organisms, shaped by the people who inhabit them, and learn how architects can harness the power of time to create enduring works of art through the interconnected worlds of design, function, and human ingenuity.




Screen


Book Description

Designer and critic Jessica Helfand has emerged as a leading voice of a new generation of designers. Her essays--at once pithy, polemical, and precise--appear in places as diverse as Eye, Print, ID, The New Republic, and the LA Times. The essays collected here decode the technologies, trends, themes, and personalities that define design today, especially the new media, and provide a road map of things to come. Her first two chapbooks--Paul Rand: American Modernist and Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media--became instant classics. This new compilation brings together essays from the earlier publications along with more than twenty others on a variety of topics including avatars, the cult of the scratchy, television, sex on the screen, and more. Designers, students, educators, visual literati, and everyone looking for an entertaining and insightful guide to the world of design today will not find a better or more approachable book on the subject.




Thoughts on Design


Book Description

One of the seminal texts of graphic design, Paul Rand's Thoughts on Design is now available for the first time since the 1970s. Writing at the height of his career, Rand articulated in his slender volume the pioneering vision that all design should seamlessly integrate form and function. This facsimile edition preserves Rand's original 1947 essay with the adjustments he made to its text and imagery for a revised printing in 1970, and adds only an informative and inspiring new foreword by design luminary Michael Bierut. As relevant today as it was when first published, this classic treatise is an indispensable addition to the library of every designer.




Essays on Design


Book Description

A compilation of essays and speeches by such designers as Paul Rand, Milton Glazier, April Greiman, Alan Fletcher, Peter Brattinga, Ivan Chermayeff, Saul Bass and many others. It should be useful to any student of design.




Look Both Ways


Book Description

In Look Both Ways, respected branding consultant and design community leader Debbie Millman has constructed a series of essays that examine the close relationship between design and everyday life. You'll find inspiration on every page as you meander through illuminating observations that are both personal and universal. Each beautifully illustrated essay reveals the magic - and wonder - of the often unseen world around us. Excerpt from "Look Both Ways" It occurred to me, as I stood there, that I could simultaneously, vividly look both ways - backward and forward, in time - at once. I remembered longing to know what was coming, who I would become and how. And I suddenly saw it all over again in front of me. The light was exactly the same, and as the sun fell and the summer shadows slivered against the elegant, lean, concrete towers in the distance, I recognized the smell of the warm air, the precise pink and grey of the coming dusk and the mysterious melancholy and joy of both knowing and not-knowing, and the continuity that occurs when both collide.—Debbie Millman




Design: Logo


Book Description

DIVThis inspirational resource features over 300 exemplary logo designs chosen by two leading identity designers, along with design “dissections,� of the authors’ top logo picks./div




Design Research Now


Book Description

Design is becoming a recognised academic discipline, and design research is the driving force behind this transformation. Design Research Now – Essays and Selected Projects charts the field of design research with introductory essays and selected research projects. The authors of the essays, all leading international design scholars, stake out positions on the most important issues of design research. They locate the significance of design research at the interface with technological development, describe what makes it a necessary ingredient of the continued development of the design disciplines, and assign it a seminal role in the relevant developments of society. The essays are supplemented by the presentation of recently completed research projects from universities in the Netherlands, the UK and Italy.