Design Books

"It's Not How Good You are, it's How Good You Want to Be"

By Paul Arden

I have just finished reading this book after seeing it as being a bestseller. The handbook contains important advice from Advertising Designer Paul Arden who is described as "a creative genius, albeit a wayward one" (Roger Kennedy, Saatchi & Saatchi)
I think that there are certain ideas in here that are pretty influential, such as the thought process behind design work, and how it's always important to share ideas, with it being that if you're in the same studio environment, and having the same atmosphere around you, all the ideas in that room are to be shared. Arden explains how it's an important factor to know how good you actually want to be and how to achieve this, he gives a scale of 'Quite Good' to 'The best in the World" allowing the reader to make their own choices all the way through and adapting rhetorical questions about the design work to the chapter involved.
Something that I really admire is the humorous yet informative nature of the book, as it allows an inviting atmosphere for the reader with humour, yet withholds some clever advice for generally having a better attitude and therefore better work ethic for the design industry.
He speaks of how competitive the advertising Industry actually is and it has allowed me some further insight into the nature of the industry such as the studio space, the colleagues he has had and the statistics behind financing such adverts.
I like the fact that reading this book helped reassure my fears of not thinking I am good enough with technical skills for the industry, as all it needs is a change of attitude towards such a thing, I may not be good at it now, but it's how good I want to be and how I'll learn to achieve such goals which is the most important part of the process.

'Typography Sketchbooks' 

by Steven Heller & Lita Talarico

Matt Luckhurst Final Work

Inspired by the Bruno Maag lecture that we had and wanting to learn more about typography in terms of using it in my own work and developing animations with the creative use of text, I decided to read and look through this book which is a collection of typographic sketchbooks from a range of typographers. I found it an interesting read as it meant that I was able to view a range of sketchbooks with all different styles and pick out some of my favourite typographers to look into further. The book contains more than one hundred of 'the world's leading typographers and graphic designers' and I was intrigued as to what ones would spring out to me.

Matt Luckhurst Sketchbook

Katie Lombardo's work after sketchbooks prep

I think due to the fact that I have always relied on my own sketchbook work, it's interesting to see professional designers' sketchbook work and how they evolved from sketches and random drawings that they produced. I think it was nice for me to delve into a new sort of medium that I'd only learnt the basics about and I loved that I could see the original work instead of the polished, finished versions, it was good to see the detail and intricacies of simple sketches that lead to these more polished ideas, and helped me believe more in my own idea generation through sketchbooks as I believe they're a powerful tool in terms of idea generation.