- ISBN13: 9781592535873
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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, Revised and Updated is a 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 Occam’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 br… More >>
March 10th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Lovely idea and format. I would imagine that this book is an valuable supplemental reading/reference for students as well as professional product/graphic designers. The references to seminal works that defined each principle were an excellent addition to the book.
The description indicated that this was a cross-disciplinary text so I was somewhat disappointed that I found that few principles that applied specifically to the environmental design disciplines and even fewer examples that clarified how universal principles might be used in environmental design — for example modularity was defined solely in terms of modular electronics when it is widely used in furnishings, interiors and buildings. However, one could quibble about the inclusion/exclusion of each principle and example and perhaps the range of scale is too great to include environments in a robust way.
The title is a bit confusing “universal design” is a term that is used by environmental designers to indicate an approach towards inclusion of the widest segment of the population in design solutions (including disabled people, etc). Interdisciplinary design principles may have been a more clear description of the authors intent.
Overall a valuable book — I would certainly recommend to industrial/product design students and other related disciplines
Rating: 4 / 5
March 10th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
The book is great, very insightful and alot of disparate info is in one place
Rating: 5 / 5
March 10th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
We used this as a group study book at work to help our software design skills. This book it packed with useful and interesting topics. The only difficulty for what we are using it for is we need to make the connection between the concepts and how it applies to software. This is a great mental exercise but does take significantly more brain power than if the application to software were laid out directly in the book. There is an immense amount of content in this book and I think we will be exploring many of the topics in more depth in future discussions.
On a non work side my wife wants to pick this up and read because of the interesting application it has to every day life and advertising. Overall a very interesting and insightful book.
Rating: 5 / 5