Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37981 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-30
• Released on: 2007-10-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Communication Arts
"A journey to discover the motivations, ambitions and frustrations of successful designers working hard in a volatile profession."

Core 77
"Offers outsiders a rare glimpse into the minds of designers. Millman gets such interesting interviews out of her subjects."

Joyce Rutter Kaye, editor-in-chief, Print magazine
"Anyone who struggles daily to create great work will be inspired and encouraged by these intimate glimpses into remarkable minds."

Customer Reviews

Very Inspiring!
This book is a must read if only to get a glimpse on how real these great graphic designers are. I enjoyed reading milton glaser's not because he's a favorite but because I found his insights humble and encouraging for the not so great graphic designer like myself. I was also bowled over to find a designer from my country and from my college included here, Lucille Tenazas! Great book!

Talking to your mentors
It's always refreshing to learn something new about the creative people that you idolize. This is a great book that will not only inspire you but also answer questions about design that are not quite so easy to articulate. You will read every page without any regret.

Casts A Lunar Flash Upon The Importance Of Graphic Design
"How To Think" is a well-knit compendium of stirring voices: often elegiac in tone, witty, funny, philosophical and brooding, rife with surprising resonance and quotable bits of touching sincerity (Emily Oberman: "I love that with every new project we undertake, we learn something new. We learn something new every day. How lucky is that?"). What is particularly striking is how Millman managed to give each voice its distinctness, as if by her very unobtrusiveness she had given each designer room to expand and expound--we hear the measured beat of live speech, the throat catches and slight stutters, bringing the gods of design down from their Olympus without stripping them of their eminence. There are so many bursts of honest humor, so many unguarded moments, that the self-deprecation and even the flashes of cryptic dialogue come off as charming (Neville Brody: "The work that I try and achieve, and the kind of work I've always tried to achieve, has a high degree of invested ambiguity").

With incisive commentary on the craft by such luminaries as Michael Beirut, Milton Glaser, Carin Goldberg, and Massimo Vignelli, hilarious turns by Chip Kidd and Number 17, and serious philosophical pondering by John Maeda and Paul Sahre (not to mention a bit of rebellious snarling by the iconoclastic James Victore), along with a mixed-bag of rant, rhetoric, and riles by the likes of Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister et al., here we have the complete picture of the state of graphic design today. And, judging by what Ms. Millman has managed to elicit from her interviewees by virtue of her journalistic guile and acute sense of empathy, we are presented with a primer on the history of graphic design, as well as a forecast on what the field will be like years down the line. Fortunately for all, graphic design will require no ledger stone, no candled bier, for, as the book makes startlingly clear, the craft is here to stay.

It is difficult to remain still while reading this book, for the words that pour forth are so salutary and rousing that one is inspired to hop out of the chair and hover over the worktable or remain barricaded in the studio for days at a time, years if this were possible. It casts a lunar flash upon the importance of graphic design as art form and panacea, deftly demonstrating its effectiveness in making and molding minds, even positively altering society. For the book shows how the best graphic designers are endowed with a profound empathy, which enables them to drill their message into even the most iron-clad heart, a theme further elucidated by Milton Glaser's quoting of Iris Murdoch: "Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real." But this alone does not distinguish those in the pantheon. Intellectual and rational rigor, as Millman points out in her introduction, are included as the hallmarks of their achievement.

Interestingly enough, running like continuous thread through the weftwork, Millman seems to evoke her own philosophy, one visible only through the feint and jab of conversation, the tension of the unstated. Many of the designers appear contradictory in nature, as if their personalities were struggling to find form, perpetually in flux, and must remain so in order for them to be able to tap into the wellspring of human desires, to fill with new spirit and new flesh the audience they wish to swoon with their creations. As Paul Sahre wisely points out, "Graphic design is, at its core, more of an altruistic activity."

Overall, the provenance and future of graphic design are arraigned in this book, and instead of offering sputtering defensiveness and vain platitudes, the craft acquits itself admirably; we see that the only thing graphic design is guilty of is delivering pleasure to millions of people--feeding, teaching, inspiring--and bestowing upon the world a glowing atmosphere of immense possibilities.