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BOOKS ON DESIGN THEORY, AESTHETICS AND HISTORY

PUBLISHER
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6.25 x 8.5 in. / 160 pgs / 250 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 24   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781942303190 TRADE
List Price: $19.95 CAD $28.95

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

Ellen Lupton, award-winning author of Thinking with Type and How Posters Work, demonstrates how storytelling shapes great design

BOOKSELLER TRADE ANNOTATION

Great graphic design tells a story!
  • Ellen Lupton, author of the bestselling Thinking with Type and curator at the Cooper Hewitt in NYC, shows how storytelling is the basis of great design.
  • The book is full of examples, diagrams, illustrations and other visuals and is affordably priced as a $17.95 paperback
  • The text draws on Lupton's actual classroom teaching experience to demonstrate how using narrative techniques normally associated with writing makes graphic design visually stronger and more persuasive.
  • Lupton is the author of popular books on design including Graphic Design: The New Basics (2008, Second Edition 2015), Thinking with Type (2004, Second Edition 2010), Graphic Design Thinking (2011), and Beautiful Users: Designing for People (2014).
  • The Cooper Hewitt will present a lecture by Lupton as a launch event for publicity and promotion.

  

COOPER HEWITT, SMITHSONIAN DESIGN MUSEUM

Design Is Storytelling

By Ellen Lupton.

Design Is Storytelling

Ellen Lupton, award-winning author of Thinking with Type and How Posters Work, demonstrates how storytelling shapes great design

Good design, like good storytelling, brings ideas to life. The latest book from award-winning writer Ellen Lupton is a playbook for creative thinking, showing designers how to use storytelling techniques to create satisfying graphics, products, services and experiences. Whether crafting a digital app or a data-rich publication, designers invite people to enter a scene and explore what’s there. An intriguing logo, page layout or retail space uses line, shape and form to lead users on dynamic journeys.

Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual perception from a narrative point of view. Presenting dozens of tools and concepts in a lively, visual manner, this book will help any designer amplify the narrative power of their work. Use this book to stir emotions, build empathy, articulate values and convey action; to construct narrative arcs and create paths through space; integrate form and language; evaluate a project’s storytelling power; and to write and deliver strong narratives.


Ellen Lupton is the author of numerous books on design, including Graphic Design: The New Basics (2008), Thinking with Type (2004, second edition 2010), Graphic Design Thinking (2011), Beautiful Users: Designing for People (2014) and Type on Screen (2014), How Posters Work (2015) and Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial (2016). She is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in Baltimore. She received the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2007.

Design Is Storytelling

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FROM THE BOOK
'Inciting Incidents,' the Introduction to 'Design Is Storytelling' by Ellen Lupton

I first heard the maxim “Design is problem solving” when I was an art student at The Cooper Union in New York City. It was the early 1980s—long before Photoshop and digital fonts overtook the page. Problem solving taught me that designers use simple forms to convey compact messages. The signage system used in New York City’s subway was—and is—a brilliant work of problem solving. Designers Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda deployed bold sans serif type and bright dots of color to unify a network of deteriorating stations. The system, implemented in 1970 after years of research, is easy to understand and inexpensive to maintain. Problem solved, four decades and counting.

The MTA’s signage system tells you more, however, than where to find the A train. When the signs appeared in 1970, those crisp white letters and sharp dots of color announced a new language of rational communication. The signs didn’t just solve a problem; they embodied ideas and principles. They celebrated the subway’s transition from a collection of competing subway lines to a government-owned public authority.

As a student, I wanted to question the limits of design. What does problem solving leave out? What about beauty, feeling, and sensation? What about humor, surprise, and interpretation? I’ve been asking these questions throughout my career as a designer and writer. Working now as a curator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, I marvel at our museum’s diverse collection of artifacts, which includes everything from a subway map by Vignelli to a birdcage shaped like a neo-Gothic cottage. A subway system is a a place where people fall asleep, fall in love, get drunk, get lost, and sometimes take their lives. Trains rumble, platforms murmur, and ads hawk everything from underpants to wrinkle cream. In 2008, Yves Béhar designed a line of free condoms inspired by New York’s subway signs (distributed by the city’s health department). Applied to condom packaging, the subway’s colorful dots represent a city where people move about and freely mingle, a place of love and danger. Béhar practices human-centered design, a methodology that combines rational problem solving and emotional storytelling.

This book is about storytelling and design. So what is a story, and what is design? Stories depict action and stimulate curiosity. A story can be shorter than a limerick or longer than an epic poem. Design uses form, color, materials, language, and planning to transform the meaning of everything from transit signs and web apps to shampoo bottles and retail spaces. Design embodies values and illustrates ideas. It delights, surprises, and sometimes manipulates. Whether crafting an interactive product or a data-rich publication, designers invite people to enter a scene and explore what’s there. Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual communication from a narrative point of view. Human beings actively seek and create patterns as we navigate the world— and we feel delight, surprise and sometimes frustration when patterns break. Storytelling can help your products and communications pulse with energy.

Design Is Storytelling is a playbook for creative thinking. The tools and concepts presented here are geared to the increasingly dynamic, user-focused eld of design practice. On the stage of design practice, users are heroes, rooms are stage sets, buttons are calls to action, and color palettes are links to rich multisensory experiences. Some of the ideas we’ll discuss, such as USER PERSONAS and MATRIX MAPS, have been developed by leading designers and educators, while others, such as AFFORDANCES and SENSORY ANTHROPOLOGY, come from diverse research fields. We’ll also explore concepts used by screenwriters and comedians, such the RULE OF THREES. Throughout the book, graphs, diagrams, lists, word webs, and other methods of creative invention will help you generate emotionally engaging concepts.

Design Is Storytelling unfolds in three acts. Act I, “Action,” explores the patterns that underly nearly every narrative. Designers can use these patterns, from the NARRATIVE ARC to the HERO'S JOURNEY, to think about users’ relationships with products and services. The story of unboxing a gadget or opening a bank account follows a dramatic arc with highs and lows, anticipation and suspense. Design is an art of planning ahead and predicting possible futures. SCENARIO PLANNING encompasses a range of tools for imagining unknown situations and possible futures.

Act II, “Emotion,” looks at how design can bring people joy and comfort. No one is happy all the time. Designing for emotion means recognizing a fuller range of human experience and accounting for feelings of sadness, frustration, and anger as well as humor, delight, and surprise.

Act III, “Sensation,” focuses on perception and cognition. Stories hinge on action, and so, too, does human perception. Principles such as VISUAL PATH, GESTALT GROUPING, and MULTISENSORY design reveal that perception is a dynamic process of creating order and finding focus. People go to cafés for the coffee, not for the paint colors, yet a room drenched in deep mahogany with top notes of ginger and black currant could make your macchiato taste smoother.

The book wraps up with a set of tools for evaluating your work. The STORY AUDIT asks questions such as, “Where is the call to action?” “How does the project function over time?” “How have you engaged the senses?” “What emotions are you supporting?” These questions will help you nd and amplify the storytelling potential of any project. How you communicate this narrative content matters, too. TIPS FOR WRITING and TIPS FOR PERFORMING will help you convey clear and active stories that clients and stakeholders will understand and enjoy.

Rob Peart, writing in 2017, rejects problem solving as the designer’s definitive act. He seeks to shift attention to the process of design rather than to physical things and xed outcomes. Such a move, he argues, gives designers “the freedom to think beyond the nail-shaped problems we’ll gure out how to bang with our particular hammer; we stop looking at the world as one big design problem to be solved, and instead see it as a bunch of avenues waiting to be explored and challenged.” To do that requires developing rich creative processes and learning how to communicate about them.

This is a book about design processes and how to talk about them. Designers use stories to stir emotions and quell uncertainty, to illustrate facts and sway opinion. The stories designers tell may be less momentous than a Greek tragedy, but they make routine tasks more legible and rewarding. The act of using a stapler or buying a bus ticket builds and crests over time, supported along the way with sounds, sights, and feedback. Roadblocks and obstacles mar the experience and slow us down (bent staples, rejected credit cards, invasions of privacy). Each scene in these everyday dramas can be pleasurable or frustrating, depending on how the experience has been constructed.

FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/21/2018

Delight, desire, surprise and trust: Design Is Storytelling

Delight, desire, surprise and trust: Design Is Storytelling

"Why would you buy one pair of shoes instead of another? A runner will focus on comfort and ergonomics. A vegan will focus on materials. A bridesmaid will be searching for an awful shade of peach. Not all choices are so pragmatic, however. A pair of shoes could also trigger emotions, such as longing, lust, or painful memories of high school…" So begins the chapter on emotions in Ellen Lupton's best-selling Design is Storytelling, back in stock at last and now in its third printing. "Designing for emotions requires thinking about how users will anticipate an experience and how they will remember it later. Will visitors to a hospital recall the warm fabrics and soft lighting of the waiting room or the harsh glare and sharp disinfectants? Will tourists who used a travel app remember how easy it was to find a train schedule, or will they recall a fake hotel review and a clumsy login process? Designers tap into people's emotions to trigger feelings of delight, desire, surprise and trust." continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/12/2017

Ellen Lupton's 'Design Is Storytelling' releases next week. Preorder now!

Ellen Lupton's 'Design Is Storytelling' releases next week. Preorder now!

“Emotion is temporal,” Ellen Lupton writes in Design Is Storytelling, her forthcoming “playbook for creative thinking” from the Cooper-Hewitt. “Currents of feeling lure us out of the present into the past and future. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that living in the present moment is a losing struggle. People, he said, are ceaselessly drawn to “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” Mindfulness—a state of attention that demands resisting distractions and staying in the present—is difficult to achieve because the mind seeks to wander back and forth. Whatever the values
 of achieving mindfulness, memory and anticipation are essential to the human condition. Anticipation and reflection are integral elements in the design of full, temporally complex experiences.” Featured diagram is based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a famous model of human psychology. continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/9/2017

Goddess in the Details: Ellen Lupton & Paula Scher at The Strand

Goddess in the Details: Ellen Lupton & Paula Scher at The Strand

Tuesday, November 14, from 7-8 PM, the Strand Bookstore presents design luminaries Ellen Lupton and Paula Scher speaking about fonts, fairy tales and what it takes to make it in graphic design. Book signing to follow.
continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/16/2017

See pics from our 2017 AIGA pop-up bookstore!

See pics from our 2017 AIGA pop-up bookstore!

Thanks to the AIGA for a wonderful fair last week in the Twin Cities, and thanks to Minneapolis-based Blu Dot for supplying our industrial-chic pop-up bookstore furniture! Scroll down for pictures from our design bookstore, including signings with Ellen Lupton, Michael Bierut, Louise Fili, Steff Geissbuhler, Sean Adams, Paula Scher, Wendy MacNaughton & Sarah Rich, and Alina Wheeler.
continue to blog


FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/3/2017

Join Artbook @ AIGA National Conference, Minneapolis

Join Artbook @ AIGA National Conference, Minneapolis

From Thursday, October 12 through Saturday, October 14, Artbook will run a pop-up design bookstore at the AIGA Design Conference, 2017. Join us for signings with design luminaries Ellen Lupton, Michael Bierut, Louise Fili, Steff Geissbuhler, Sean Adams, Paula Scher, Wendy MacNaughton & Sarah Rich, and Alina Wheeler!



BOOK SIGNINGS LISTED BELOW
continue to blog


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