A fun perspective on design, with lots of examples. I would have liked to hear more about how the author came to his conclusions, instead of having so many shallowly discussed examples. ( )

TED előadás alapján készült kis füzetke, amit szinte egy ültő helyben el lehet olvasni. Sok ábra és viszonylag kevés magyarázat. A téma a design, azaz hogy hogyan lehet a figyelmet felhívni a termékre, ami lehet bármilyen hétköznapi dolog, akár egy buszjegy is. Miként érdemes egyensúlyozni az egyértelműség (más tekintetben unalmasság) és a titokzatosság (zavarosság) között, hogy elérjük a kívánt hatást. A szerző saját munkáin keresztül mutatja ezt be, legtöbbször olyan módon, hogy bemutat egy tárgyat, gondolatot, ami az éppen vizsgált design megszületésében kulcsszerepet játszott.
Volt benne egy-két jó gondolat, de semmi extra. ( )

Chip Kidd is a very lucky man. Right out of graphic design class he was hired into publishing in New York City, and has been a book cover designer at the same firm ever since. He works with the biggest names and gets seemingly free creative reign. He has collected some of his best covers, and the real world design elements that inspired them, into a short, fast little book you can read in an hour or two.

Kidd created a continuum, a horizontal line that goes from clarity to mystery, rating various elements of daily life according to how much work it takes to understand them. He measures his book covers by how much they might benefit from extreme clarity to extreme mystery.

The medium is the message, so you would expect a book cover designer to publish a book. Unfortunately, this is written as belonging to some other medium. Every image is accompanied by a short paragraph or two, more of a narration than a narrative. The images on the opposite page would have much more impact on a large screen, particularly in an e-book, where you can’t see the image at the same times as the text. The whole effort fairly screams to be a 50 minute slide show, which Kidd narrating. He would be far more entertaining than the book.

And so it is. This is the print extension of his a TED talk, available online, for those who need a permanent version. The video is much more fun.

David Wineberg ( )