"From album covers and concert posters for some of the world's biggest rock stars to prints featured by interior designers to paintings and collage in fine art collections, Rex Ray's artwork is a rare combination of pop sophistcation, commercial design, and handmade craft. This is the first monograph to span Rex Ray's career in various media. Paper cutouts, mixed-media collages, paintings, digital prints, and the highly acclaimed graphic design and music packaging that launched his visual career ... are all brought together in a treasure trove of Rex Ray's unique and alluring aethetic ..."--

An imaginative, thought-provoking gift book to awaken your senses and attune them to the things that matter in your life. Welcome to the era of white noise. Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen. Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing. This gorgeously illustrated volume will spark your creativity--and most importantly, help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises--131 of them--Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague and finally, to rediscover your sense of passion and to notice what really matters to you.

Keep the fascinating magical creatures of the wizarding world close at hand with this miniature art book featuring concept art from the Harry Potter films. The magical world of the Harry Potter film series is filled with captivating and curious creatures, from the fearsome dragons of the Triwizard Tournament to the crafty goblins of Gringotts Bank to the owls who carry the wizarding post. To bring these creatures to life onscreen, an extraordinary team of artists created a huge collection of sketches, drawings, paintings, and digital renders, drawing some creatures from established mythology and others from the depths of their imagination. One of a new line of palm-sized art books, The Art of Harry Potter: Mini Book of Creatures presents an incredible treasure trove of Harry Potter creature art in a unique miniature format. Filled with behind-the-scenes facts and insights, it’s the perfect way to keep the magic and mystery of the Harry Potter films close to your heart.

Most of our expereince is visual. We obtain most of our information and knowledge through sight, whether from reading books and newspapers, from watching television or from quickly glimpsing road signs. Many of our judgements and decisions, concerning where we live, what we shall drive and sit on and what we wear, are based on what places, cars, furniture and clothes look like. Much of our entertainment and recreation is visual, whether we visit art galleries, cinemas or read comics. This book concerns that visual experience. Why do we have the visual experiences we have? Why do the buildings, cars, products and advertisements we see look the way they do? How are we to explain the existence of different styles of paintings, different types of cars and different genres of film? How are we to explain the existence of different visual cultures? This book begins to answer these questions by explaining visual experience in terms of visual culture. The strengths and weaknesses of traditional means of analysing and explaining visual culture are examined and assessed. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary examples, it is argued that the groups which artists and designers form, the audiences and markets which they sell to, and the different social classes which are produced and reproduced by art and design are all part of the successful explanation and critical evaluation of visual culture.

The Art of Game Design guides you through the design process step-by-step, helping you to develop new and innovative games that will be played again and again. It explains the fundamental principles of game design and demonstrates how tactics used in classic board, card and athletic games also work in top-quality video games. Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible, and award-winning author Jesse Schell presents over 100 sets of questions to ask yourself as you build, play and change your game until you finalise your design. This latest third edition includes examples from new VR and AR platforms as well as from modern games such as Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us, Free to Play games, hybrid games, transformational games, and more. Whatever your role in video game development an understanding of the principles of game design will make you better at what you do. For over 10 years this book has provided inspiration and guidance to budding and experienced game designers - helping to make better games faster.

This book features projects, developed during the artist Allan Wexler's forty-five-year career, which mediate the gap between fine and applied art using the mediums of architecture, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing. Wexler's production can be broadly described as tactile poetry composed by re-framing the ordinary with the intention of sustaining a narrative about landscape, nature, and the built environment that highlights the intriguing and surprising characteristics latent in the elements and rituals that pervade daily life. His work demonstrates a commitment to re-evaluating basic assumptions about our relationship to the built and natural environments. Organized thematically across four categories--abstraction, landscape, private space, and public places--this publication is a richly illustrated cross section of Wexler's multi-scale, multi-media work, featuring his own writings, narratives, and reflections.

A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. “A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images.” —The New York Times What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page—a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so—and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved—or reviled—literary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature—he considers himself first and foremost as a reader—into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.