Designing Across Cultures

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Summary: Crucial Information for all designers
Review: CONNECT WITH ANY MARKET...
Ronnie Lipton has done the design community a grand service with her "Designing Across Cultures" -- this is vital information for anyone who designs advertising or editorial content intended to be read by a wide target market.
Through obviously exhaustive research, the book addresses the dos and don'ts of marketing to U.S. Hispanics, African-, Asian-, and European-Americans. She documents color combinations, and image concepts that to an American market have a positive impact, but to other cultures can ruin your product's image and credibility!
* Did you know that upright chopsticks in a rice bowl means death?
* Did you know that you never want to use an image of bikers to a Latino marketplace?
* Do you know why you must avoid images of THREE people in an international market place?
* Do you know why your ad with a solid reverse BLACK background will send the Asian marketplace running?
* Do you know how "black" your black should be when your images will be seen by African Americans?

Wake up designers... the U.S. marketplace is no longer Caucasian. If your ads and editorial images are to be successful at gaining market share, then you've got to understand rather than offend. This book will tell you how. ...

Rating:
Summary: GET OUT YOUR LIST AND CHECK IT TWICE
Review: Ronnie Lipton provides with her new book "Designing Across Cultures" a sensitive and well-considered roadmap to creating designs for multi-cultural audiences.

The book offers countless insights on reaching specific groups, and warns of pitfalls to avoid. (Having just re-read the chapter on German-Americans I now understand why they kept looking funny at me back in the Old Country.)

Apart from being an indispensable volume for agencies and studios involved in multicultural marketing, it is fascinating reading and food for thought for every designer eager to more fully understand the global facets of our field. ...

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Summary: What this book is and isn't
Review: This is a wonderful book which can help designers be more aware of those who may be looking at their work, who have differences in culture and how they see the world. At least those who live in the U.S.

This book focuses mostly on those who live in "America" who are of different cultures. And that is a good thing.

What would be even more helpful for some of us, is to know how to design for international audiences outside of the US, but then I suppose that would be more than 1 book - more like a whole library of them.

And a further challenge is to be able to design "across cultures" internationally (which seems mostly impossible!)

But there are good, general guidelines which are valuable to those who need to make sure their concepts and designs, don't offend those to whom they wish to express ideas.