What It Means to Be a Designer Today

What It Means to Be a Designer Today
Author: Liz Stinson
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2024-04-02
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1797227203

AIGA’s Eye on Design presents a provocative collection of essays and interviews that cover a wide-reaching examination of the profession of design today and its impacts on society and culture. Eye on Design is an editorial platform from AIGA that has, for the last decade, covered the ins and outs of the design industry. From documenting bold new work from global designers to chronicling the field's most critical issues, their reported stories, op-eds, interviews, and conversations help designers make sense of the world and place their profession within a broader context. Weaving together original and previously published content from some of the most important writers in today’s design conversation, this book for designers encapsulates wide-reaching topics that strive to answer an essential question: What does it mean to be a designer today? Organized into three parts—Reflections, Questions, and Ideas—this book covers the most pressing issues and provocations that designers face in our current world, including: The evolution of personal branding Teaching design history The cult of minimalism The perils of hero worship Designers’ role in conspicuous consumption The meaning of visual sustainability And more Contributors include the book's editors, Liz Stinson and Jarrett Fuller, and such outstanding design writers as Rick Poynor, Anne Quito, Briar Levit, Cliff Kuang, and many more. Accessible, engaging, and conversational, What It Means to Be a Designer Today is an enduring resource and vibrant gift book that speaks to design students and educators, working designers of all levels, and anyone interested in graphic design.

Design Is a Job

Design Is a Job
Author: Mike Monteiro
Publisher: Book Apart
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-11
Genre: Designers
ISBN: 9781952616266

Take care of yourself as a working designer and use design as a tool for good.

Designing Your Life

Designing Your Life
Author: Bill Burnett
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 110187533X

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

Design the Life You Love

Design the Life You Love
Author: Ayse Birsel
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1607748827

An interactive journal that serves as a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you've always dreamed of, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer. Life, just like a design problem, is full of constraints -- time, money, age, location, and circumstances. You can’t have everything, so you have to be creative to make what you want and what you need co-exist. Design the Life You Love is a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you’ve always wanted, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer. Through four steps that reveal hidden skills and wisdom, anyone can design a life they love!

Design as Art

Design as Art
Author: Bruno Munari
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2008-09-25
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0141920807

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

Design Justice

Design Justice
Author: Sasha Costanza-Chock
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0262043459

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

Emotional Design

Emotional Design
Author: Don Norman
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2007-03-20
Genre: Design
ISBN: 0465004172

Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

Design Research Now

Design Research Now
Author: Ralf Michel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2012-12-21
Genre: Design
ISBN: 3764384727

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.

The Philosophy of Design

The Philosophy of Design
Author: Glenn Parsons
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2015-11-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 150950219X

The Philosophy of Design is an introduction to the fundamental philosophical issues raised by the contemporary practice of design. The first book to systematically examine design from the perspective of contemporary philosophy, it offers a broad perspective, ranging across key philosophical areas such as aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. The first part of the book explores central issues about the nature of design and its products, and the rationality of design methods. A central theme is that Modernist ideas, such as those offered by Loos and Gropius, provide important responses to these philosophical issues. In the second part of the book, these Modernist ideas serve as touchstones in the exploration of key issues for design, including: the place of aesthetics in design; designs relation to personal expression; the meaning of function; and designs relation to consumerism. The social responsibility of designers, and the impact of design practice on ethical reasoning are also discussed. Written in an accessible style, The Philosophy of Design presents a new perspective on design and a provocative reassessment of the Modernist legacy. It will engage students and designers with current philosophical debates, helping them to bring into clearer focus the meaning of contemporary design, and its unique challenges and possibilities.

Sustainable Graphic Design

Sustainable Graphic Design
Author: Peter C. Fine
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1474277632

There is little appreciation for what happens to graphic design artifacts after their useful life has ended. Sustainable Graphic Design outlines graphic design's relationship to production and consumption, demonstrating how designers can contribute solution-oriented responses to consumption, through tools and methodologies applicable to both education and practice. The book provides an overview of sustainable graphic design, based on global engagement with design's relationship to consumption, and features highly creative work inspired by complex issues and including studies of a variety of visual artifacts, the larger built environment and the very ordinary products of consumption. Presenting cutting-edge work in graphic design from practitioners, educators and students from North America, Northern Europe, Australia and the Far East, the book helps students visualize their future roles engaging with the field in response to ecological concerns, social justice and present systems of design by using extensive case studies of student work with step-by step instructions adapted for use by instructors.