Tag: Designers

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Unmasking Theatre Design: A Designer’s Guide to Finding Inspiration and Cultivating Creativity

Every great design has its beginnings in a great idea, whether your medium of choice is scenery, costume, lighting, sound, or projections. Unmasking Theatre Design shows you how to cultivate creative thinking skills through every step of theatre design – from the first play reading to the finished design presentation. This book reveals how creative designers think in order to create unique and appropriate works for individual productions, and will teach you how to comprehend the nature of the design task at hand, gather inspiration, generate potential ideas for a new design, and develop a finished look through renderings and models. The exercises presented in this book demystify the design process by providing you with specific actions that will help you get on track toward fully-formed designs. Revealing the inner workings of the design process, both theoretically and practically, Unmasking Theatre Design will jumpstart the creative processes of designers at all levels, from student to professionals, as you construct new production designs.

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The Fashion Designer’s Sketchbook: Inspiration, Design Development and Presentation (Required Reading Range)

The Fashion Designer’s Sketchbook is a must-have resource for both fashion students and practicing designers who wish to learn new ways of generating design ideas in order to create successful fashion collections, and who wish to develop their own creative aesthetic. It demonstrates how the fashion design sketchbook serves as a crucial creative tool for professional development, as well as a valuable portfolio presentation companion for potential employers.

This book identifies three distinct types of creative journal, each representing a different phase in the design process: the inspiration diary, the process or working sketchbook, and the presentation sketchbook. It explores how one develops out of the other, each stage moving the process forward organically from discovery, to direction, to design development and delivery.

The Fashion Designer’s Sketchbook shows readers how to turn their sketchbooks into source books; how to generate design ideas from everyday experience; explores multiple ways of presenting and arranging elements within pages; details digital search and storage techniques as well as bulletin board journaling. Exercises are provided to improve readers’ illustration skills through in-store sketching and visual analysis, focusing awareness of design aesthetics, taste levels and design vision. The book also explores the need to address market realities, consumer profiles and trend analysis in building design collections based on target customer demographics and a range of markets.

Beautifully illustrated and filled with a wide variety of inspirational, full-colour design illustrations, The Fashion Designer’s Sketchbook also features interviews with designers and industry experts. With a strong emphasis on exploratory design, this exciting resource provides readers with stimulating exercises designed to enable readers’ sketchbook work and their creative vision to shine.

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Be Your Own Decorator: Taking Inspiration and Cues from Today’s Top Designers

Selecting favorite rooms from more than fifty renowned designers such as Kelly Wearstler, Bunny Williams, Albert Hadley, Nate Berkus, and Mary McDonald—and shot by the world’s top shelter photographers—Susanna Salk offers insightful advice on how to apply basic design principles to interiors.

Organized into chapters on balance, color, mixing, accessorizing, arrangements, rule breaking, and whimsy, Salk walks through the process of great design, illustrating how the featured designers made the decisions they did to make these rooms look so great. The book’s encouraging, conversational tone, practical tips and ideas, and quotes by the designers themselves explaining their philosophies empower the reader to create stylish, functional, and unique rooms of their very own.

Covering a range of styles from traditional to modern, formal to whimsical, and showcasing some of the best work by the best designers of our age, Be Your Own Decorator is a rich resource for the aspiring decorator.

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Web Designer’s Idea Book, Volume 4: Inspiration from the Best Web Design Trends, Themes and Styles

SPECIAL SHRINKWRAPPED BUNDLE! Get inspired for your next web design project with this hefty collection of more than 1,300 well-designed sites categorized by color, style, theme and more. Author Patrick Mcneil, creator of popular web design blog designmeltdown.com, has cataloged thousands of sites, and showcased in these books are the very best examples. Whether you’re brainstorming with a coworker or explaining your ideas to a client, these books provide a powerful communication tool you can use to jumpstart your next project.

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An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration From the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers

Travel + Sketching = Inspiration

When we travel, we don’t want to follow the same itinerary as everyone who’s come before us. We want to feel like explorers, adventurers in undiscovered territory. And that’s exactly what sketching can bring to the travel experience.

An Illustrated Journey captures the world through the eyes of 40 talented artists, illustrators and designers. You’ll experience the wonder of seeing familiar sights through a fresh lens but, more important, you’ll be inspired to set pen to paper and capture your own vistas.

The really wonderful thing about a sketchbook is that it can be totally private. You don’t have to have an ounce of talent to enjoy learning how to really see what’s in front of you. But lucky for us, the sketchbooks captured here are lovely, creative, intimate windows into each artist’s mind.

So, whether you’re just returning to the art of drawing, abandoned by most of us after childhood, or you’re looking for inspiration to take your illustration work in a new direction, An Illustrated Journey will take you on a wonderful trip of the imagination. All you need to pack are a pencil and a piece of paper.

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The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Volume 3: Inspiration from Today’s Best Web Design Trends, Themes and Styles

Quick Inspiration for Web Designers

Featuring more than 650 examples, this third volume of The Web Designer’s Idea Book is packed with visual inspiration for creating top-notch web design. Web design expert Patrick McNeil, author of the popular Web Designer’s Idea Book series, is back with the latest examples of the best design on the web today.

Arranged thematically, this guide puts important topics like technology, design styles, elements, site types and site structure at your fingertips. This new volume also includes a detailed discussion of the various content management systems available to help you find the best platform for your project.

An indispensable reference, this book provides you with the latest in themes, styles and trends you need to keep your projects relevant in the fast-paced and every-changing world of web design.

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An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers

Find Insight and Inspiration for Your Creative Life

An artist’s journal is packed with sketches and captions; some rough, some polished. The margins sometimes spill over with hurriedly scrawled shopping lists and phone numbers. The cover may be travel-worn and the pages warped from watercolors. Open the book, and raw creativity seeps from each color and line. The intimacy and freedom on its pages are almost like being inside the artist’s mind: You get a direct window into risks, lessons, mistakes, and dreams.

The private worlds of these visual journals are exactly what you’ll find inside An Illustrated Life. This book offers a sneak peak into the wildly creative imaginations of 50 top illustrators, designers and artists. Included are sketchbook pages from R. Crumb, Chris Ware, James Jean, James Kochalka, and many others. In addition, author Danny Gregory has interviewed each artist and shares their thoughts on living the artistic life through journaling.

Watch artists—through words and images—record the world they see and craft the world as they want it to be. The pages of An Illustrated Life are sometimes startling, sometimes endearing, but always inspiring. Whether you’re an illustrator, designer, or simply someone searching for inspiration, these pages will open a whole new world to you.

Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life is a visual delight of color and texture–a funky and frenetic “book about books people have made,” perfect for chronic doodlers, journalers, and art lovers. Sharing vibrant excerpts from the notebooks of 50 illustrators, artists, and designers, each accompanied by an introduction by the artist, it’s a gorgeous, intimate exploration of the creative process. Gregory’s passion for the “illustrated journal” is infectious–for him, artist’s sketchbooks represent a nonthreatening place to record “risks, mistakes, regrets, thoughts, lessons, and dreams.” Whether you are charmed by the illustrations of Amanda Kavanagh, or intimidated by the musings of Stefan Sagmeister, poring over this eclectic group of fledgling and famous “artists” will inspire you to tackle an illustrated journal of your own. –Daphne

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