About Design: Insights and Provocations for Graphic Design Enthusiasts

A Treatise on the Development and Practice of the Graphic Design Discipline

About Design offers an enlightening and opinionated, albeit concise, excursion concerning many facets of the field of design. It emphasizes the discipline of graphic design, while incorporating a taste of the author’s makeup. It is a definitive, expansive observational, and knowledge-infused treatise that is expected to be particularly engaging for students and educators as well as for design practitioners. However, much of the content could tempt any readers who may be marginally inquisitive concerning visual art, design, and the web of “creativity.”

This informative, and sometimes scrappy, expedition is founded on the author’s fifty-five years’ entrenchment in design practice and higher education. Consequently, there are many pointed and sometimes novel perspectives, but it is essentially grounded on the commonly acknowledged doctrines that exist within the field. Some of the particular chapter topics deal with:

• Defining the elements of visual form
• An analysis of the concepts of aesthetics and creativity
• Establishing some usable guidelines for effective designing
• Outlining many factors that are involved with design education, including a sketch of its history
• Miscellaneous related subjects, such as considerations of what makes something exceptional

The aforementioned themes, along with others, are interspersed with interludes that challenge certain long-held assumptions, provide contextual references, offer insights and suggest some fresh ways to analyze how we see, choose, inspire, and do.