Graphic Design Makeovers: How to Redesign for Maximum Impact

Rating:
Summary: WONDERFUL for the self-taught designer!
Review: i've always had a natural talent for composition and design, but lack the formal training in that dicipline. this book is wonderful because it allows you to grow as a designer by taking you on voyage inside the creative process of some of the country's leading firms. why was one logo chosen over another? how did the design firm successfully interpret and execute the needs of the client? why was a certain symbol chosen for a logo? and most important how to make a good design an awesome design. wonderful, large full-color photographs of before and after the makeover really bring the point home and help you see for yourself. you can't help but come away with ideas on how to improve the designs you work with everyday. great price too!

Rating:
Summary: New and Improved?
Review: The work in this book reaffirms a thought (or if it is too vague, call it a notion) I've had about design since my student days. --Which is this: there is nothing easier than taking someone else's work and playing with it. (Call it "improving" it, if you still believe in such things.) In my experience, I think it is hard NOT to better your predecessors' work (or not to SEEM to do so, anyway) by virtue of the fact that anything you do after someone else is going to be informed, by default, with a more current, more fashionable tweak than he/she could possibly have had in hand or mind back when, and will therefore look a little fresher. But it isn't only that. Redesign is by its very nature a reaction to something concrete; re-designers are afforded the luxury of a springboard, as it were, whereas first-time, original design is facing a white, staring-back page without direct precedent, with nothing but attitude, experience and habit as your guide. (For many designers, just seeing a staid and conservative design will be enough to unlock a battery of inspired, near-satirical reactions that can be channeled productively onto a page.) So another difference between the Befores and Afters here is that the Afters had an advantage in place when they began their work for a given client that the Befores often lacked. Are they not therefore accountable to a tougher, higher standard? It seems to me, in a book of this kind, they would be. And I am not sure I have detected that the author has kept up her part of the bargain here.

The Befores in this book look fairly servicable. Some are downright good. Most of the redesigned "breakthroughs" are not a lot more than cosmetic touchups that add the luster of newer, friskier style to "dated" designs. --Designs some of which are indeed stolid, printshop-flavored affairs, but which more often were built on the trends of THEIR day, and so dated as quickly as many of these After solutions probably will. That is probably the real danger in books like this. The author keeps it lite, WAY lite (think of Dynamic Graphics magazine) and perepuates the notion that design is primarily about fashionable styling, this decades coat of new paint.