Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.

Collects some of designer Michael Bierut's best essays on design, covering such topics as color-coded terrorism alerts, the cover of "Catcher in the Rye," the planet Saturn, and the town of Celebration, Florida.

"Design is a way to engage with real content, real experience," writes celebrated essayist Michael Bierut in this follow-up to his best-selling Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (2007). In more than fifty smart and accessible short pieces from the past decade, Bierut engages with a fascinating and diverse array of subjects. Essays range across design history, practice, and process; urban design and architecture; design hoaxes; pop culture; Hydrox cookies, Peggy Noonan, baseball, The Sopranos; and an inside look at his experience creating the "forward" logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Other writings celebrate such legendary figures as Jerry della Femina, Alan Fletcher, Charley Harper, and his own mentor, Massimo Vignelli. Bierut's longtime work in the trenches of graphic design informs everything he writes, lending depth, insight, and humor to this important and engrossing collection.

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

One of the seminal texts of graphic design, Paul Rand's Thoughts on Design is now available for the first time since the 1970s. Writing at the height of his career, Rand articulated in his slender volume the pioneering vision that all design should seamlessly integrate form and function. This facsimile edition preserves Rand's original 1947 essay with the adjustments he made to its text and imagery for a revised printing in 1970, and adds only an informative and inspiring new foreword by design luminary Michael Bierut. As relevant today as it was when first published, this classic treatise is an indispensable addition to the library of every designer.

"James Victore is hell-bent on world domination, one graphic design project at a time. A self-taught designer, Victore's work is vivid, memorable and often controversial. In this funny and honest book Victore takes readers through a collection of his greatest hits", telling the stories behind the work, his inspirations, process and lessons learned. Throughout his career he has sought comrades, not clients - brave, smart collaborators who have given him the freedom to reinterpret old design solutions and to pressure viewers to think about issues and ideas in a new way. The result is a body of work that for 20 years has been plastered on the streets of New York, exhibited at MoMA and featured in magazines all over the world. The book will be wrapped in a poster jacket, created by Victore specifically for the book, and will have three edge black stain and hot pink ribbon bookmark, making it a must-have design object for students, graphic designers and anyone with an interest in the power of ink on paper." --Publisher description.

Best-known for his corporate brand logos and art direction, Paul Rand (1914–1986) transformed commercial art from craft to profession, introduced European design standards to American commercial art, influenced the look of advertising and book design, and altered the ways in which major corporations including IBM, UPS, and Westinghouse did business. His adherence to a strict design form in his work for corporate clients was balanced by a playful side , captured in this spirited collection of literal (and figural) back-of-the-envelope sketches, doodles, notes, and imaginative sparks that later found their full form in his children's books, logos, and personal work.