Metalheart

Rating:
Summary: 50% great / 50% crap
Review: Andreas Lindholm's portion of the book is magnificent, his designs are simply amazing with beautiful details that just force you to stare in awe.

Anders Ronnblom's part of the book on the other hand, is utter garbage. It is no exaggeration to say that it seems as if it was his first time playing around with Photoshop filters. Complete lack of eye for style.

A sad combination. Still worth the money, even though I would have had preferred a book with the same price tag, but only half the content.

Rating:
Summary: Future of Design
Review: Every designer has a vision, to surpass all thats been done before them, to move forward with new ideals and create a new standard for which others may follow. This book is the future of design. Everything in this book is brand new and fresh. The designs range from biomorphic to minimalist, chaotic to organic and most of the time they just all meld together to form one dynamic form like nothing you have ever seen. Metalheart is a book like no other, if you are lucky enough to get your hands on a copy it may very well change your whole perspective on design. ENJOY!

Rating:
Summary: High End Graphics
Review: One of the very, very best digital grarphics "art" books I ever seen !
The accompanying CD includes postscript fonts, 3D typeface images with alpha-channels and paths,
sample background royal-free collections, 100 MB high- res images, animations, video clips, and graphic
libraries. MetalHeart is made with passion for this kind of illustrative and experimental work.

It's art that matters.
Art is important.
MetalHeart is art.

Rating:
Summary: High End Graphics
Review: One of the very, very best digital grarphics "art" books I ever seen !
The accompanying CD includes postscript fonts, 3D typeface images with alpha-channels and paths,
sample background royal-free collections, 100 MB high- res images, animations, video clips, and graphic
libraries. MetalHeart is made with passion for this kind of illustrative and experimental work.

It's art that matters.
Art is important.
MetalHeart is art.

Rating:
Summary: they weren't joking - 50/50.
Review: when i come across an artifact like this, i take it as a proof that the universe is truly incomprehensible, that meaning is arbitrary, that, at the very least, the entire canon of human values is so much worthless nonsense, and as such, it can't possibly matter that i'm about to graduate with a degree in design/illustration and i sometimes freak out over whether i'm "good enough."

how does such a one as ronnblom get published. how does this happen. somebody explain this to me, because the fact has overturned my entire universe of meaning. i'm not just being a design snob... if a high skool freshman showed up blazed for art class one day (having only taken it as an elective blow-off easy A in the first place), and happened to sit down in front of photoshop and mess with it for an hour out of sheer boredom, he might produce something similar, if more sophisticated.

lindholm's stuff (by contrast) is well-organized and attractive. don't talk to me about "dated." digital images are dated by the time you print them out; let's just grant that and get on with separating the gold from the dross, cuz good design is good design and bad is bad. (i believe that in spite of everything.) you wouldn't know it from looking at this book though, which brings me back to my original point. you see some really visually interesting vector and photoshop/3d pieces of lindholm's in the first part, and youre on a certain level, and then you get to that utter garbage from ronnblom and it's really upsetting. later they collaborate, and you can literally separate out which parts of the compositions ronnblom screwed up with his unfortunate use of filters and what-not. finally there are some interesting pieces by various designers more or less within the aesthetic that lindholm uses in his pieces - vast, technological-looking environments with layers of photoshop collage and vector line drawings and schematics, typically organized around a "burst" of 3d objects and text.

this is a decent book, and the CD includes a lot of "fun extras." really the only thing to warn you about is ronnblom - have i mentioned him yet? be prepared. otherwise enjoy, even if it makes you feel cool about yourself to call it "dated."

Rating:
Summary: Not cutting edge anymore.
Review: While I do love the book, I would have loved it even more if it was published 2-3 years ago. I don't know if the book was delayed, but it took forever before it was released. When I first saw images from the book years ago I was blown away. Now everybody makes images like this for their websites. But get it anyway, it's still a great book.