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Product Description
Product Description
The graphic design equivalent to Strunk & White's The Elements of Style
This book is simply the most compact and lucid handbook available outlining the basic principles of layout, typography, color usage, and space.
Being a creative designer is often about coming up with unique design solutions. Unfortunately, when the basic rules of design are ignored in an effort to be distinctive, design becomes useless. In language, a departure from the rules is only appreciated as great literature if recognition of the rules underlies the text. Graphic design is a "visual language," and brilliance is recognized in designers whose work seems to break all the rules, yet communicates its messages clearly.
This book is a fun and accessible handbook that presents the fundamentals of design in lists, tips, brief text, and examples. Chapters include Graphic Design: What It Is; What Are They and What Do They Do?; 20 Basic Rules of Good Design; Form and Space-The Basics; Color Fundamentals; Choosing and Using Type; The World of Imagery; Putting it All Together?Essential Layout Concepts; The Right Design Choices: 20 Reminders for Working Designers; and Breaking the Rules: When and Why to Challenge all the Rules of this Book.
About the Author
Timothy Samara is a New York City-based graphic designer and educator. His fifteen-year career, focused primarily on visual identity development, includes a diverse project history-from branding systems and user interfaces to books, animation, and architectural work. He is currently a member of the design faculty of the School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute of Technology, Purchase College School of Art + Design, and New York University. He is the author of Making and Breaking the Grid, Typography Workbook, Publication Workbook, and Type Style Finder, all from Rockport Publishers. Tim lives in New York, NY.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best graphic design book!,
By
This review is from: Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (Paperback)
Very well written, very insightful. Every page of the book is designed to visually translate its contents, therefore it becomes very easy to absorb the informations that are carried out in the book. Real graphic design at work! Loved it!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.1 out of 5 stars (47 customer reviews) 125 of 128 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Next best thing to going to design school,
By ZanBee - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (Paperback)
As a graphic designer with little academic preparation in the field (my college major was in psychology, supplemented by a handful of college-level art classes and several continuing education classes in Adobe software & printing technologies), I rely heavily on books for my continued growth and education. Over the past few years, I've amassed a rather large library of graphic design books. The vast majority of my collection falls into one of two categories - either "technical" (dealing with software & printing techniques) or "eye candy" (fun to look at and good for inspiring a new idea now and then, but not suited to actually improving my design skills). Timothy Samara's books are one of the few exceptions. I actually *read* his books and learn a great deal about design from them.Design Elements is the best primer on graphic design I've encountered. It starts out with 20 rules for good design, while readily admitting that rules are meant to be broken, once you fully understand them and can break them *deliberately*. It goes on to cover the topics of form & space, color, typography, images, and layout. Finished examples are combined with simple thumbnail "studies" that illustrate the concepts quite well and provide you a springboard for playing around on your own. The textual portions are concise and well-written. I heartily recommend this book for anyone seeking a serious, concise overview of all the major elements of graphic design - whether you're a student or a seasoned professional looking for a good reference book/refresher. Yes, there are books out there that cover each of these topics in much greater depth. But for what this book attempts to do, it does amazingly well. 22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Visual Treat,
By Nathan Packer - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (Paperback)
From the design elements of a unique placement of page numbers in the margin to very colorful representations of design elements, this book is well-worth the price. Far to often, other books attempt to explain color rendering and shape meanings without investing in professional demonstrations of the concepts. The mechanics of type, the texture of form and space, and composition strategies are well presented. A veteran graphics designer will find this book a refreshing creativity stimulant, and the new designer will find this book a genesis of ideas. I reach for this book whenever I need some brain/eye design candy.Ok, the book was not perfect. My technical communication background is the source of my quibble with the author's choice to use a light gray type in the body text against a white page. When the reader struggles with the difficulty of the read, there is a reduction in the transfer of information. It is as if to say, look only at the color because all the information is in the graphics - yet there was good information presented in the body text. 12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Avoid this book.. they broke the biggest rule:legibility,
By J. Whiteside - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual (Paperback)
This book is unreadable. Most of it appears to be in about a 6 pt font. While open space can be a powerful part of graphic design, one should not create it by reducing type to that size typically reserved for legal disclaimers.Additionally, it did not seem very well organized overall or on each individual page. Obviously done by a graphic artist who hates text. Next time hire a copywriter. |
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