Books  

In Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks, more than fifty of the world's leading graphic designers and illustrators open up their private sketchbooks to offer a rare glimpse of their creative processes.

We are living in a golden age of data visualization, in which designers are responding to the information overload of our digital era with astonishing feats of visual thinking.

Using a wide variety of techniques, they transform complex ideas into clear, engaging, and memorable infographics. In recent years, books and websites have been collecting the field's best. While stimulating, these finished projects offer little insight into how visual solutions were reached, making them of limited use to designers wanting to produce work of their own.

In Infographics Designers' Sketchbooks, more than fifty of the world's leading graphic designers and illustrators open up their private sketchbooks to offer a rare glimpse of their creative processes.

Emphasizing idea-generating methods—from doodles and drawings to three-dimensional and digital mock-ups—this revelatory collection is the first to go inside designers' studios to reveal the art and craft behind infographic design. —

Organized alphabetically by designer, Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks combines both breadth and depth in 352-pages. The topics span range from politics to science to pop culture to finance.

The book excels at showing how essentially dry, complex scientific information is brought to life by storybook-like infographic imagery embedded with raw data. Still, however polished the final product is and whatever data it represents, the common theme is a good old-fashioned sketch at the start.


It is incredibly interesting to go behind the scenes of a designer’s work process, through their sketches.

Author Steven Heller is the cochair of the MFA Designer as Author Department at NY's School of Visual Arts. He is the author of many books, including Graphic, Typography Sketchbooks, Scripts, and Shadow Type.

Co-author Rick Landers is founding partner and co-creative director of graphic design studio Landers Miller Design.

By kree8tiv

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 Design  

The Art of Product Design by Hardi Meybaum explains the rise of Open Engineering, a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes.

Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Organizations should be drawing on the creativity of engaged customers and outsiders, but instead they rely on the same small group of internal "experts" for new ideas. Designers and engineers should be connecting with marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and most importantly, customers. The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Madeexplains the rise of "Open Engineering," a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes.

The book helps explain how to establish open flows of information inside and outside an organization, increasing the quality and frequency of input from different groups and stakeholders.

 Art  

Nowadays, receiving a hand written letter appears quaint and charming—making the newly released images of the illustrated envelopes that legendary artist Edward Gorey sent his then-editor Peter F. Neumeyer, even more enticing.

The artist Edward Gorey and his editor Peter Neumeyer met in the summer of 1968. Gorey had been contracted by Addison-Wesley to illustrate Donald and the . . . , a children’s story written by Neumeyer. On their first encounter, Neumeyer managed to dislocate Gorey’s shoulder when he grabbed his arm to keep him from falling into the ocean. In a hospital waiting room, they pored over Gorey’s drawings for the first time together, and Gorey infused the situation with much hilarity. This was the beginning of an invigorating friendship, fueled by a wealth of letters and postcards that sped between the two men through the fall of 1969.

Those letters, published here for the first time in the book, Floating Worlds are remarkable for their quantity and their content. While the creative collaborations of Gorey and Neumeyer centered on children’s books, they held wide-ranging interests; both were erudite, voracious readers, and they sent each other many volumes. Through their discussions of these books, one marvels at the beauty of thoughtful (and merry) discourse driven by intellectual curiosity.



The letters also paint an intimate portrait of Edward Gorey, a man often mischaracterized as macabre or even ghoulish. His gentleness, humility, and brilliance—interwoven with his distinctive humor—shine in each letter; his deft artistic hand is evident on the decorated envelopes addressed to Neumeyer, thirty-eight of which are reproduced in Floating Worlds.
During the time of their correspondence, Peter Neumeyer was an assistant professor at Harvard University and then a professor at Stony Brook University in New York. His acumen and compassion, expressed in his discerning, often provocative missives, reveal him to be an ideal creative and intellectual ally for Gorey.

More than anything else, Floating Worlds is the moving memoir of an extraordinary friendship. Gorey wrote that he felt that they were “part of the same family, and I don’t mean just metaphorically. I guess that even more than I think of you as a friend, I think of you as my brother.” Neumeyer stated, “Your letters . . . your existence has made something of this world that [it] hadn’t the possibility of before.”

A truly prodigious and original artist, Gorey (1925-2000), gave to the world over one hundred works, including The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest and The Wuggly Ump; prize-winning set and costume designs for innumerable theater productions from Cape Cod to Broadway; a remarkable number of illustrations in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, and in books by a wide array of authors from Charles Dickens to Edward Lear, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Florence Heide and many others. His well known animated credits for the PBSMystery series have introduced him to millions of television viewers. Gorey's masterful pen and ink illustrations and his ironic, offbeat humor have brought him critical acclaim and an avid following throughout the world.

By kree8tiv

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 Creative Intelligence  

Having only recently declared the death of design thinking, author and educator Bruce Nussbaum is soon to release a new book entitled, Creative Intelligence.  The book focuses on developing 'CQ' and applying it to real-world problems.

Author Bruce Nussbaum blogs, tweets, and writes on innovation, design thinking, and creativity. The former assistant managing editor for Business Week, he is Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design.

Nussbaum is also the founder of the Innovation & Design online channel; founder of IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly innovation supplement; and author of the forthcoming book, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire, which will be available next month.

A year-and-a-half ago, Nussbaum famously declared that design thinking was dead.  Now with  Creative Intelligence, he explores a new form of cultural literacy and a method for driving innovation and sparking start-up capitalism.

According to Nussbaum, the world is quickly changing in ways we find hard to comprehend. Conventional methods of dealing with problems have become outmoded. To be successful, one can't just be good; one must also be a creator, a maker, and a doer.

  Scott Robertson  

Continuing from his boyhood obsession with soap-box racers, Scott Robertson has for years instructed artists and designers the 'drawthrough' method and continues to work in the transporation and entertainment industries developing exciting concept art and design.

Born in Oregeon, concept designer and artist, Scott Robertson grew up in the country. When he was a child, his artist father, Richard, taught him how to draw and design the toys in his imagination.

After two and a half years at Oregon State University, Scott transferred to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1986, California where his father had studied illustration.

Robertson graduated in 1990 with honors and a B.S. in Transportation Design. He then opened a consulting firm in San Francisco, where he designed a variety of consumer products, the majority being durable medical goods and sporting goods. In 1995, he began teaching at Art Center, first with a year-and-a-half stint at Art Center Europe in Vevey, Switzerland (now closed), and then in Pasadena, California.