Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
79 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. Beirut 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 its truth. In 79 Short Essays on Design, designers and non-designers alike can share and revel in his insights.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
wow!
Customer Rating:
Hello Amazon, the content of this book is basically very similar to what you'll read in the blog, funny, intelligent and informative BUT this book is AMAZINGLY built, designed and crafted. I took my internship in a bookbindery and I'd rate the craftsmanship behind this book as A+, EXCELLENT JOB and a pleasure to read, if you don't own it, YOU TOTALLY SHOULD!
For the love of design.
Customer Rating:
I have read just a few of the stories so far in this book and have loved each one of them so far. The design of this book can easily be appreciated by any designer - they compliment the story to which they are printed for.
Blips of inspiration.
Customer Rating:
Definitely not a book to be read straight through.
However, reading one essay at a time, it's full of anecdotes and facts about the design industry - as well as general writings on being a designer.
Great for little blips of inspiration.
"Not everything is design ...
Customer Rating:
But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything."
Many of Michael Bierut's 79 essays here appeared online or in other collections. The essays cover an enormous range of topics and touch on an incredible number of people.
Each essay is set in a different typeface, ranging in age from Bembo, designed in 1495, to Flama, created in 2006. Every experienced reader is familiar with the colophones at the end of many books, and many of us recognize Helvetica, Bodoni, Arial, Roman and Times New Roman. At least one font stars in a movie; Helvetica "is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture," and has been well received by Amazon reviewers.
(Virginia Postrel reviewed the book for "The Atlantic" focusing on fonts, and has a very interesting discussion with the director, Gary Hustwit, of "Helvetica" on the Atlantic website.)
Bierut is a senior critic in graphic designs at the Yale School of Art. He is a co-founder of the Design Observer blog. He comments about graphic design in everyday life on the blog and on Public Radio International's "Studio 360."
Here's a sample of the riches here:
"It's not hard to see why innovation is becoming the design world's favorite euphemism. Design sounds cosmetic and ephemeral; innovation sounds energetic and essential. Design conjures images of androgynous figures in black turtlenecks wielding clove cigarettes; innovators are forthright fellows with their shirtsleeves rolled up, covering whiteboards with vigorous magicmarkered diagrams, arrows pointing to words like 'Results!' But best of all, the cult of innovation neatly sidesteps the problem that has befuddled the business case for design from the beginning. Thomas Watson, Jr.'s famous dictum 'good design is good business' implies that there's good design and there's bad design; what he doesn't reveal is how to reliably tell one from the other. Neither has anyone else. It's taken for granted that innovation, however, is always good."
Robert C. Ross 2008
this is some guy's blog
Customer Rating:
These are basically posts from this guy's blog. It's fairly interesting, but I had a hard time reading it straight through.
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