From author and design expert Steven Heller, a guide to critiquing, explaining, and interpreting a piece of design for all who practice and observe it
Writing is designing, and writers are designers. Different writing stylesmade up of words and phrasesare just as important in describing a physical or virtual designed work as color, texture, and material form. The design writer must make the prose as necessary and exciting to read as a designed objectfrom the simplest business card or product packaging to the grandest monumentmust be to see and to use.
This book covers how and what to write when critiquing, explaining, discovering, introducing, and interpreting a piece of design. It is for the student or the expert, the novice or the professional, who seeks to best communicate with audiences. Examples of writing include a range of styles and disciplines, from journalism, scholarship, criticism, and businessby the expert, for the laymanfor publication in books, magazines, blogs, catalogs, and manuals.
Contents include the following:
Writing Is Design
Design Needs Words
Forms of Expression
Addressing an Audience
Jargon, Pro and Con
Writing on Graphic, Digital, Information, Typographic, and Product Designs
Examples of Good Design Writing
and much more!
Explaining design means being design literate and literacy means writing intelligibly and creatively. This book covers it all, for and through those who practice and observe design.