flatnessisgod

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic!
Review: As Soon As I Finished It, I Wanted to Start Again! This book is mesmerizing, compelling, and beautiful. It is simply astonishing that it was all written by one man. What a marvelous read! My only complaint is that it should have cost more! I feel so guilty that I got so much for so little.

Rating:
Summary: Ryan is awesome...but this book is a little weak.
Review: I'm familiar with Ryans' "art" work, and it truley is inspiring. So I bought this book and got a bunch of his logo and design stuff...which is cool...just not exactly what I was looking for.

Rating:
Summary: What your design should be more like
Review: McGuiness tells the designers of the world to stop for a few brief seconds and consider the melange of visual stimuli that we wade through every day. He both shows us how and asks us why we so easily idendify with the vernacular. The ideas in this book are simply and effectively illustrated and serve as a modern suplement the other great graphic design references such as Gregg Barryman's Notes on Graphic Design.

Rating:
Summary: As Soon As I Finished It, I Wanted to Start Again!
Review: This book is mesmerizing, compelling, and beautiful. It is simply astonishing that it was all written by one man. What a marvelous read! My only complaint is that it should have cost more! I feel so guilty that I got so much for so little.

Rating:
Summary: mediocrityisprevalent
Review: well, where to start. i'm glad i didn't buy this book, it's a complete sham, which may very well be the point - but it's completely superficial, and insulting to real graphic designers and design students to pass these exercises off as a touchstone of modern design principle. the dadaist overtones are not lost on me, but the straight forward design solutions are just that - straightforward, highly derivative (IF NOT TRITE), and quite frankly, boring. if this is the present and future of design, we're in serious trouble. i'm the biggest proponent of thumbing my nose at established design, but you have to know who you're thumbing it towards. breaking from the past requires a knowledge of that past, i see no evidence of such hind- and/or fore-sight in this book. it's been reiterated ad nauseum that picasso was probably the finest draftman of his day, if not history. point being he didn't simply begin with cubism or collage. i fear that the computer has caused such a horrible deterioration of the design process, that this book is what the masses will consider 'good' design. unfortunately those masses include potential clients and students who are our future designers. for those students i recommend beale, lustig, hoffman, rand, lissitzky, malevich, mondrian. go to the source, otherwise you've resigned yourself to a future of luke warm, rehashed gruel. eat up kiddies, hope you choke. this doesn't deserve any stars in my opinion, but as a matter of default i must give it 1. designers are not rock stars, but this guy is the equivalent of britney spears - all filler, literally and figuratively.