Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Whether a marketing campaign or a museum exhibit, a video game or a complex control system, the design we see is the culmination of many concepts and practices brought together from a variety of disciplines. Because no one can be an expert on everything, designers have always had to scramble to find the information and know-how required to make a design work until now.
Universal Principles of Design is the first comprehensive, cross-disciplinary encyclopedia of design. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, it pairs clear explanations of every design concept with visual examples of the concepts applied in practice. From the "80/20 rule to chunking, from baby-face bias to Ockham's razor, and from self-similarity to storytelling, every major design concept is defined and illustrated for readers to expand their knowledge.
This landmark reference will become the standard for designers, engineers, architects, and students who seek to broaden and improve their design expertise.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Great book with a couple of flaws
Customer Rating:
This is a really good read for aspiring designers who want to consider different approaches to the creative process, whether you are designing print or reinventing the bottle opener. It gives 100 principles, with examples, and doesn't claim to be exhaustive. For the most part, the insight is useful, but I feel compelled to point out two glaring errors and how ironic it is that such would exist in what is an otherwise very useful book.
1. The section about how to warn future civilizations of radioactive waste is utterly incorrect. The very solutions they offer in the book would draw people towards dangerous areas, not repel them, because of natural human curiosity. If I was hiking around and I saw the visuals suggested I would naturally want to go get a closer look. So, that was clearly overcooked design, when the simplicity of using depictions of skulls and related pictograms would do the trick, regardless of race, culture, background or language.
2. Part of the book regards how to not deter customers from entering an establishment, such as a store or a restaurant. One example they give is to avoid having salespeople waiting for you at the door. In another part of the book, they use the Apple stores as an example of a successfully inviting design, which is ironic given that the first thing you see upon approaching an Apple store is salespeople waiting for you at the door.
I'm not sure how these errors made it into the book but it is otherwise very good and I recommend it.
Good Reference
Customer Rating:
A short review, but this book is a very good reference book and refresher, but nothing more. It includes spreads of design principles, one side describing the principle and one side illustrating it with examples. It is organized in alphabetical order, another obvious indication of its use as reference material.
I bought this book intending to use it as a tool for a basis for design education, but find that I can't really use it as such. I'll need another book that has more in-depth, coherently organized content as a teaching tool. Still don't know if I will return it, but I am sure I will find it useful later in my career.
are we reading the same book?
Customer Rating:
I'm sorry to disagree with the effusive praise by others here, but I recently picked up this book at the store, and after leafing through most of it, I put it down again. And I had specifically sought it out due to the positive reviews here.
I was kind of surprised at the disorganized, scattershot presentation -- I could not tell what the book was about. The concepts of design that they present (and some of them are a stretch) are presented in alphabetical order, surely a design flaw that they themselves should have recognized. There is no sense of coherence or theme to each idea, which is forced to be described in the two pages (facing left and right). It gave the impression of reading a dictionary.
Of the pages I did read, some of the ideas were interesting, regarding layout/spacing/ease of use, but other ideas were sparsely described and you could see that they were using art to fill the space (barely relevant/irrelevant photos/graphics).
In essence, I had expected much more from this book, like Envisioning Information by Tufte, but instead it was disappointingly disorganized. Too scatterbrained to be a good guide, not comprehensive enough to be a good reference.
Great design characteristics book
Customer Rating:
This well written reference to design characteristics. I has good descriptions of the characteristic, examples, and graphics. I got it to apply to user interface design, but it applies to any design field. I would recommend this along side the Tufte books.
An Essential Design book
Customer Rating:
This is one of my favorite books and I wish I'd found it years ago. It covers exactly what you'd expect from the title - the Universal Principals of Design. And that's design in the broadest sense so these fundamental principals can be applied to a variety of disciplines from UI design, industrial design, to photography. This is another one of those books that should be owned by anybody with an interest in design.
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