Graphic Design: The New Basics

How do designers get ideas? Some places they look are design annuals and monographs, searching for clever combinations of forms, fonts, and colors to inspire their projects. For students and professionals who want to dig doopor into how form works, this book shows how to build richness and complexity around simplo relationships. Wo croated this book because wc didn’t sec anything like it available for today’s students and young designers: a concise, visually inspiring guide to two-dimensional design.
As educators with decades of combined experience in graduate and undorgraduato teaching, we have witnessed the design world change and change again in response to new technologies. When we were students ourselves in tho 1980s, classic books such as Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual (publishod in 1965} had begun to lose their relevance within the restless and shifting design scene.Postmodernism was on the rise, and abstract design exercises seemed out of step with the current interest in appropriation and historicism.

During the 1990s, design educators became caught in the pressure to teach (and learn} software, and many of us struggled to balance technical skills with visual and critical thinking. Form sometimes got lost along the way, as dosign methodologies moved away from universal visual concepts toward a more anthropological understanding of design as a constantly changing flow of cultural sensibilities.
This book addresses the gap botwoon software and visual thinking. By focusing on form, we have re-embraced the Bauhaus tradition and the pioneering work of the great formal design educators, from Armin Hofmann to some of our own teachers, including Malcolm Grear.
We believe that a common ground of visual principles connects dosigncrs across history and around the globe.
We initiated this project in 2005, after stopping back and noticing that our students were not at ease building concepts abstractly. Although they were adept at working and reworking pop culture vocabularies, they were less comfortable manipulating scale, rhythm, color, hiorarchy, grids, and diagrammatic relationships.
In this book, you won’t see exercises or demonstrations involving parody or cultural critique not that there is anything wrong with those lines of inquiry. Designers and educators will always build personal meaning and social content into their work. With this book wo chose to focus, however, on design’s formal structures.
This is a book for students and emerging designers, and it is illustrated primarily with student work, produced within graduato and undergraduate design studios. Our school, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), became our laboratory. Numerous faculty and scores of students participated in our brave experiment over a two-year period. The work that emerged is varied and diverse, reflecting an organic range of skill levels and sensibilities. Unless otherwise noted, all the student oxamplos woro goneratod in the context of MICA’s courses; a few projects originate from schools we visitod or where our own graduate students are teaching.
Our student contributors come from China, India. Japan, Korea, Puorto Rico, Trinidad. Soattlo, Minne-apolis, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, and many other places. The book was manufactured in China and published with Princeton Architectural Press in New York City.

Book Details

• Title: Graphic Design: The New Basics
• Author: Ellen Lupton
• Grade Level: 8 and up
• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (March 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568987021
• ISBN-13: 978-1568987026
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 7.8 x 9 inches