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The second book in the Basics Architecture series explores the materials used in construction today: stone and brick, concrete, timber, steel and glass, and composites. Reviewing the history of these materials puts them in context, revealing applications in both historical and contemporary architecture. Each chapter showcases the work of a master architect, such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Kahn, whose work is associated with that material. Projects by such greats as Eric Parry, Caruso St. John, Zaha Hadid, Nicholas Grimshaw Architects, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, dRMM, and more are included. Practical and inspiring, Basics Architecture: Construction and Materiality is an invaluable resource for students and professionals alike.

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Where do great ideas come from? Linus Pauling said, “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.” Easy to say when your ideas have won the Nobel Prize—twice! How can the rest of us follow Pauling’s advice? Basics Product Design: Idea Searching lays out the steps—starting with “Question convention.” Why is something done the way it’s done? How could it be done faster, simpler, better? Inspiring visuals and case histories showcase a variety of product designs, some new, some old. Learn to think smarter with Basics Product Design: Idea Searching.

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This book offers a connoisseur’s overview of typeface design, exploring the most elegant fonts from the history of publishing. Taken from a distinguished Dutch collection, this exuberant two-volume edition traces the evolution of the printed letter via exquisitely designed catalogs, showing type specimens in roman, italic, bold, semi-bold, narrow, and broad fonts. Borders, ornaments, initial letters and decorations are also included, along with lithographic examples, letters by signwriters, inscription carvers, and calligraphers. Featuring works by type designers including: William Caslon, Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke, Peter Behrens, Rudolf Koch, Eric Gill, Jan van Krimpen, Paul Renner, Jan Tschichold, A. M. Cassandre, Aldo Novarese, and Adrian Frutiger.

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Safety is an instinctive need that has guided human choices throughout history. Now more than ever, it has become not only a focus, but almost an obsession. Designers are trained to mediate between disruptive change and normalcy and can soothe people’s anxiety. When scientific revolutions happen, they translate them into objects that people can understand and use. Good design provides protection and security without sacrificing the need to innovate and invent. This book and the exhibition that it accompanies document the unique objects that designers have created to answer people’s needs, both physical and psychological. Physical objects include shelters for victims of disasters and homeless people, hideaway furniture, and personal armor and protective gear, while psychological objects include those that thwart identity theft, offer self-defense, and provide comforting reassurance. The objects presented here reflect how good design goes hand-in-hand with personal needs. This book includes an introductory essay by Paola Antonelli, Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; an essay by Phil Patton on cars; another by Marie O’Mahony on materials and technologies; and a third by Cameron Sinclair on design for refugees and third-world facilities. The issues addressed by each of these authors will find resonance in people’s minds and souls. Edited and with Introduction by Paola Antonelli, Essays by Phil Patton, Marie O’Mahony and Cameron Sinclair.

On a hillside overlooking Beverly Hills is a house that “vibrates with the love that created it,” says its owner, actress Jennifer Aniston.“I want to say this just right,” she muses. “I am so proud of this house. And I want to celebrate the people who made it: the master craftsmen who poured so much of themselves into its creation.” Not the least of these is designer Stephen Shadley, who worked with her on the project for nearly two and a half years. “I’ll be lucky if I ever do anything with this kind of team and freedom again,” raves the designer. “It was a project without a problem.” The designer has collaborated with Diane Keaton on two of her residences in Southern California and one in Arizona and with Woody Allen on the interiors of his apartment in New York City. He and Aniston had come close to working together on two other residences.

Via & more: Architectural Digest

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“The Fundamentals of Interior Design” takes the subject of interior design and explains the essential concepts in a logical and sensible way by looking at the process of design, from first contact with a client, to presentation of the finished design work and beyond. Throughout the text, guidelines are given to provide structure and the reader is encouraged to adapt and initiate methodologies to suit individual project needs. This approach is gives designers a belief in their own abilities, and confidence to tackle different projects with the unique challenges that each one brings.

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The design of lingerie is often seen as a mystery, even by professionals working in other sectors of the fashion industry. This book aims to explain the processes at work and the many unexpected influences that shape the colour, silhouettes and decoration. The book will document the rise of the deluxe lingerie brand. This interest in luxury labels has led many young designers to chose lingerie as a creative outlet conscious of fashion, but also with a clear view of their own lingerie world. The book features the work of 30 lingerie designers from around the world, bringing out the individuality of each designer and providing a compelling insight into their working methods. Beautifully illustrated throughout, it presents inspirational images from the designers collections alongside their sketches and mood boards.

Sauerbruch Hutton is a practice founded by Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton with its main offices in Berlin and London. Active as an independent concern for upwards of twenty years, they have developed a personal language that is essentially characterised by two evident features: the free, sinuous forms of some of their buildings and a bold, emphatic use of colour. Having said that, subtending these obvious characteristics are other no less important ones that are in some way derived from the first ones. We are referring to their wish to create a sense of place, whatever the situation, be it in an urban centre or in a rundown industrial area on the outskirts. Their buildings are gestures on an urban scale that resolve the programme of needs defined by the client and establish a dialogue with the location.

Via & more: 2G

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This thorough, self-paced guide to Adobe Creative Suite 4 is ideal for users who want to learn the key features of Adobe’s stellar collection of professional design tools. Readers are first given a brief program overview of the Design Suite that highlights common features and includes a section on cross-media workflows. Then readers will get up to speed with each software application using step-by-step, project-based lessons, with the lessons in each chapter building upon the reader’s growing knowledge of the programs. Projects include designing a logo and creating basic assets, creating a brochure, prototyping a basic Website, creating interactive Flash and PDF documents, communicating through mobile devices, and submitting work for collaborative reviews. Review questions at the end of each chapter wrap up each lesson to help reinforce the skills learned in each chapter.

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Thinking Objects: Contemporary Approaches to Product Design explores the many approaches designers take to their work, deconstructing the design process. How do objects “communicate” to us? This book reveals how designers can learn to read the signals an object sends, interpret meaning, and discover historical context, and use those messages in their own new product designs. Readers will learn to recognize current genres and approaches to design, and to understand the motivation of the pioneers who created iconic objects. Globalization, technology, the media, and the need for a sustainable future are all part of contemporary product design, and this innovative guide helps students and designers everywhere to incorporate these influences and more.

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What meets the eye when we gaze at a typical Arcadian landscape, of the kind represented in Flemish paintings, in Giorgione or Poussin? A natural expanse, interrupted by the presence of human artefacts extraneous to the biological fabric, but combined with its panorama.

They are the signs of a human presence, artificialia that write the map of naturalia. These anthropic elements incarnate the aesthetic vectors essential to the transformation of natural environment into landscape.

When looking at another kind of view (since landscape, like human beings, expresses itself in many ways), for example an urban landscape of our time reproduced in a photograph of New York, London or Tokyo, the situation changes irreversibly.

Here the background is not nature any more, but a web of concrete, glass and steel. In this new scenic backdrop, against which contemporary humanity moves, nature has become a guest welcomed and tolerated, but out of context. The relationships between background and figure, nature and artefact, are reversed: a typical sign of our times.

The problem, however, in this new coexistence, is that nature, reduced to the status of pure ornament or luxury accessory, cannot shoulder the transliteration of urban space into landscape. This happens because nature rests on its metropolitan background in an absolutely superficial way, like a quotation with no bearing on the main text, with no effective nexus of reciprocal co-implication.

This incoherent outlook on the combined presence of nature and the artificial cannot be expected to produce the aesthetic paradigms of a new landscape. Consequently, our society is bereft of any really contemporary definition of landscape and remains anchored instead, in its collective imaginary, to models still steeped in the past.

In this problematic context, many landscape designs have in recent years started from the concrete aim to establish the codes of contemporary landscape. With a critical and sentient approach to the issue, although different in scale and action, these new landscapes propose models, examples and forms on which to rest the eye and educate the mind, as micro/macro spaces of what might be called a planetary garden.

Flavio Albanese. Planetary landscapes

Via & more: domusweb

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“The Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture” provides an introduction to the key elements of this broad field. From climate change to sustainable communities, landscape architecture is at the forefront of today’s most crucial issues. It serves as a guide to the many specialisations complimentary to landscape architecture, such as landscape management and planning, and urban design. This book explains the process of designing for sites, including historical precedent, evolving philosophies, and how a project moves from concept to design to realisation.

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This is the first publication on the work of Konstantin Grcic, one of the most interesting and prolific designers of today. The book offers an insight into his design process showing products at different stages of development together with a remarkable portfolio of finished pieces through sketches, drawings and specially commissioned photographs. Edited by photographer and visual researcher Florian Böhm and with texts by Konstantin Grcic, Francesca Picchi and Pierre Doze.

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The restaurant boom of the past two decades has both been a breeding ground for and relied heavily on arresting graphic design. A restaurant’s menu, matchbooks, business cards, signage, and napkins are as important to the brand and image as its interiors. Graphic design can set the entire tone of a restaurant. This book celebrates the unsung heroes of restaurant graphics, and illustrates the best examples of their craft from around the world. Aimed at professional graphic designers, students, and restaurateurs seeking inspiration, it provides in-depth examples that show how restaurant graphic design is developing and hints at changes to come in the future.

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In this timely book, author Marcus Fairs helps readers understand the shift of green design from marginal to mainstream by featuring products and buildings that address immediate concerns about global warming and environmental degradation. Through vast architectural projects to modest one-off pieces of salvaged furniture, the book shows how the design world is responding to the environmental challenges of this century. Author Fairs demonstrates key developments in sustainable design as seen in lighting, houseware, furniture, textiles, products, interiors, architecture, and transportation, including the innovative use of fuel-cell technologies and ultra-lightweight materials.

The book shows how the introduction of eco-friendly materials is changing the products around us and charts the rise of low-energy lighting sources and their impact on lighting design. Emerging trends in green design are also covered, from recycling (reusing existing objects to create new products) to ethical sourcing (ensuring products come from sustainable sources). By presenting existing green innovations as well as visionary projects, Green Design paints a bright future in which technology and ethics merge for the benefit of people and the planet.

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Fusing exquisite design with engineering, shoe design is quite unlike any other fashion discipline. Showcasing some of the most exciting and innovative contemporary footwear designers from across the globe, this book refl ects the rich and diverse range of cutting-edge design, and uses specially commissioned photography, never before published sketches, and original design material to illustrate the unique blend of design skill and craftsmanship that footwear design demands.

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Naoto Fukasawa (b. 1956) is one of the best-known Japanese product designers working today. Fukasawa’s design philosophy relies on careful observation of what people do and feel in their everyday lives. This keen study allows Fukasawa to find simple solutions that touch the senses and link to shared memories. By working with the `iconic’ value of a product, be it a watch or a sofa, Fukasawa is able to come up with designs that address the common knowledge about things that people have. His groundbreaking wall-mounted CD player for MUJI in 1999 was based on the image of a kitchen fan and moved away from all the conventions of hi-fi equipment manufacture. It was a simple appliance, restrained in appearance and function, and very different from the numerous black boxes that had become the standard in the market.

Interestingly, as Fukasawa’s products are based on people’s common and not always conscious view of things, his design solutions sometimes swim against the current of received opinions to achieve popularity and success. The LCD TV monitor he designed for PLUS MINUS ZERO reinstates the shape of the cathodic-tube TV set instead of becoming even thinner; his mobile telephone Infobar for KDDI/au has large keypads, referring back to the first models of the 1980s.

The book is the first monograph published in English of the work of this innovative designer. Edited by Fukasawa himself with contributions by writers from East and West, it includes a selection of his products to date, ranging from umbrellas and vases to sofas and telephones. Illustrated with never-before-seen photographs and drawings, Fukasawa’s text elucidates the ideas behind each of his projects. Essays by artists, designers, and lecturers, notably Anthony Gormley, Jasper Morrison, and Bill Moggridge from IDEO, complete the book by giving an account of Fukasawa’s design philosophy and of the significance of his work for the contemporary design world.

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Sequential image making is a rich area of original and innovative work, riding the wave of interest in the art of illustration and graphic novels. Basics Illustration: Sequential Images investigates visual storytelling through examples of work that is intelligent, experimental, oblique, beguiling, incisive, visceral, and beautiful. Topics covered include concepts, pacing, narrative structure, storylines, genres, storyboards, navigation, visual codes, book illustration, graphic novels, comics, e-comics, manga, anime, animation, children’s books, interactivity, web publishing, mobile devices, film theory, paper engineering, film, design, video art, motion graphics installations, club art and VJs, viral images, kinetic worlds, exhibition and retail display, podcasts, video games, and more. For anyone interested in illustration and visual communication, Sequential Images is a must-have.

It’s the time of year when nearly every publication with intellectual ambitions trots out its annual predictions guide. We’re calling ours “What’s Next: The 1-5-10 Issue.” We’ve asked leaders in architecture and design to forecast events in their fields—one, five, and ten years from now. But first, we wonder, is it even possible to predict the future? Unforeseen, history-shattering events are often just that: unforeseen and thus unpredictable. All prognostications are extrapolations on the past, based on the here and now. They’re educated guesses. This doesn’t necessarily make them wrong or unreliable or self-serving (although they can be all of those things). It merely underscores the almost utopian nature of the whole exercise. But perhaps this is as it should be. Designers, after all, are inherently optimistic. In their minds, problems exist to be solved. We offer our predictions in that spirit, hoping they serve as inspirations for the future. // Martin C. Pedersen

Via & more: Metropolis