Book Description
The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The Game Design Reader is a classroom sourcebook, a reference for working game developers, and a great read for game fans and players.
Thirty-two essays by game designers, game critics, game fans, philosophers, anthropologists, media theorists, and others consider fundamental questions: What are games and how are they designed? How do games interact with culture at large? What critical approaches can game designers take to create game stories, game spaces, game communities, and new forms of play?
Salen and Zimmerman have collected seminal writings that span 50 years to offer a stunning array of perspectives. Game journalists express the rhythms of game play, sociologists tackle topics such as role-playing in vast virtual worlds, players rant and rave, and game designers describe the sweat and tears of bringing a game to market. Each text acts as a springboard for discussion, a potential class assignment, and a source of inspiration. The book is organized around fourteen topics, from The Player Experience to The Game Design Process, from Games and Narrative to Cultural Representation. Each topic, introduced with a short essay by Salen and Zimmerman, covers ideas and research fundamental to the study of games, and points to relevant texts within the Reader. Visual essays between book sections act as counterpoint to the writings.
Like Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader is an intelligent and playful book. An invaluable resource for professionals and a unique introduction for those new to the field, The Game Design Reader is essential reading for anyone who takes games seriously.
Customer Reviews:
Absolute must-read!.......2005-12-18
Curious minds that have delighted in games will love this book! I adored the compilation of shared thoughts from "Who's Who" in game design. Aesthetically, the book is so cute! My copy sits on my coffee table. The book had me at the cover...
Book Description
This completely updated edition of an industry classic shows a new generation of editors and designers how to make their publications sing! Readers will find a treasury of practical tips for helping story and design reinforce each other and create powerful pages that are irresistible to readers. Brimming with hundreds of illustrations, Editing by Design presents proven solutions to such design issues as columns and grids, margins, spacing, captions, covers and color, type, page symmetry, and much more. A must-have resource for designers, writers, and art directors looking to give their work visual flair and a competitive edge!
Customer Reviews:
Excellent guide and reference material........2007-01-10
I use this book to teach my first year graphic design students. It has some excellent and simple illustrations. The layout of the book is very friendly and easy to follow.
Excellent book!! - "Conflicted" should look a little deeper!.......2006-12-02
First of all, if "Conflicted" found the book difficult to follow, so be it. Mileage varies from person to person. And I will agree, the cover is a disappointment.
However, the part you couldn't read was a design element, not intended as text to be read; the **title** is printed in clear letters at the top of the cover. Second, this book is intended for beginners and - since we supposedly learn 90% of everything we *ever* learn by example - it tries to teach as much by example as by assertion. Hence, the informal style and wonderful profusion of examples. White **shows** as well as tells on almost every two-page spread - that's one of the major strengths of the book, in my opinion. Instead of distracting the reader by content-specific illustrations, he chose **very carefully** hand-drawn illustrations - and, by the way, mostly black and white to keep the book affordable. And for all that concrete terminology you couldn't find - try the Glossary that begins on p. 241.
As I said, your mileage may vary. But to me, this book presents the basic concepts of page and type design for the beginner in a way that really worked for me. 30 years later, I still value it!
Thank you, Mr White........2006-05-13
I have probably never learned more about any subject than I have with this book. Being the eternal student, I can be critical if a book doesn't teach me anything new, or pads itself out with extraneous rot. This book does neither of these things. It is concise, incredibly comprehensive, clear, honest and delivers much much MUCH. How I would love to get inside this man's brain and/or have him partner my business! The attention to detail and range of example is exhilarating. An exemplary work that could very well have delivered the bones of my entrepreneurial idea, or at the very least, given me the vim and knowledge to execute it. Thank you, Mr White.
Conflicted.......2005-09-21
The Good:
The book contains an abundance of illustrations which can be very helpful. The author uses the text of the book itself as bad examples of design.
The Bad:
As a newbie to publication design, I approached this book as a student. I probably would have never even opened the cover of it if it weren't required for a class. The design of the cover (and most of the book) is horrible. I can't read the title and it does nothing to attract me visually. The illustrations are so sloppy they are unprofessional. Although sketches in real life should be messy, the sketches in the book should at least be interpretable. The author never uses any concrete terminology, so it is difficult categorize information as you absorb it.
An Especially Useful Feature . . ........2005-08-11
Rather than reiterating what other reviewers have already done a great job of covering, I'll simply put my proverbial 2 cents worth in for my favorite feature of the book.
Anyone who has taken design classes or read many design books has seen that the authors almost always instruct the reader to sketch out "roughs" of ideas on paper while doing the initial brainstorming on a design. This is the only book I've run into with any quantity of such sketches included.
It's always a pleasure to see an author put their money, or in this case their page space, where their mouth is.
Nicely Done.
Average customer rating:
- The resource I keep coming back to...
- Not what the title explains
- The benchmark in its field
- Thoughtful, but overly long and loosely held together
- Terribly wordy - lots of deadwood
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Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers
Karen A. Schriver
Manufacturer: Wiley
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ASIN: 0471306363 |
Book Description
From an international leader in document design, research-based insights about writing and visualizing documents that people can use . . .
This book is for writers and graphic designers who create the many types of documents people use every day at home or school, in business or government. From high-tech instruction manuals and textbooks to health communications and information graphics, to online information and World Wide Web pages, this book offers one of the first research-based portraits of what readers need from documents and of how document designers can take those needs into account.
Drawing on research about how people interpret words and pictures, this book presents a new and more complete image of the readerâa person who is not only trying to understand prose and graphics but who is responding to them aesthetically and emotionally.
Written by document design expert Karen A. Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design features:
- Case studies of documents before and after revision, showing how people think and feel about them
- Analyses of the interplay of text and pictures, revealing how words, space, visuals, and typography can work together
- A fascinating and informative timeline of the international evolution of document design from 1900 to the present
Customer Reviews:
The resource I keep coming back to..........2005-08-10
This book is the most useful one I've found on the subject. Design books of all stripes (document-design focused or otherwise) have a tendency to provide "principles" without ever providing real support for said principles. Books will be loaded with recommendations that may or may not be well supported by data, quantified or at least well documented study results, etc.
Schriver's book does exactly the opposite, and this is why it is longer than many others. It is impossible to read about Schriver's document design principles and not know exactly where they came from. Virtually every recommendation is, for once, well supported by research findings. This book never tells you to do something without first explaining why it should be done.
If you're looking for a short-and-sweet book that conveys the most basic principles of document design ("principles" that may in fact be a designer's personal preferences), this isn't it.
If you're looking for a book that will help you make better design decisions and help you understand why to make these decisions over others, then this is the book for you. After all, it isn't so unusual for professional designers and others in the workplace to have to explain exactly why they've made certain choices over others, and this book can help.
Not what the title explains.......2005-04-26
This book could be cut off to more than half pages it is now. The information is over explained and reader gets bored.
Better luck next time!
The benchmark in its field.......2005-03-06
The reviewers who say this book is wordy and over-long just don't get it. This is not a "how to do it in five easy lessons" handbook. If you find a book like that - burn it! Books like that are usually self-published by amateurs who don't understand the complexities of the field, and they are worse than useless. In fact, they are often filled with advice that has been so oversimplified that it is actually wrong. You CANNOT learn document design in five easy lessons.
Conversely, Schriver's book is a refreshingly thoughtful, well-researched, and comprehensive overview of document design. It starts with the history and philosophy of document design and continues through contemporary needs and trends. It contains especially strong advocacy for usability studies, including documentation of those conducted by the author and her colleagues. It's about time we document creators stopped "blaming the user" and started taking responsibility to make improvements when documents are hard to understand.
Document design is a relatively new field of study, so the comprehensive timeline of its development is a gold mine, especially since no author has attempted it before. This type of in-depth research is sorely needed.
Schriver explains things in a way that is clear and compelling, with lots of thoroughly documented examples and supporting charts, tables, and graphics for clarification. And her research spans several decades, which is invaluable for tracking the evolution of document design. She has produced an unparalleled work which will be the benchmark against which other books are measured for a long time.
Thoughtful, but overly long and loosely held together.......2003-11-22
For an author who believes in giving priority to readers, she actually does a rather poor job considering her reader. She is an academic and as such has the foible of wanting to put all her knowledge on display. So she's done little trimming and condensing of her material into a form that is really useful to readers who want to quickly get to core ideas about document design theory and practice.
The opening chapter abstracts are unnecessarily long, and just repeat what shortly follows in the body of the chapter. While I liked the way she put document design in a social and historical context, this could have been done much more succinctly. The long timeline is too tangentially related to what readers really want to know about, namely document design, to interest many of them. It seems included because the professor did a lot of research and just hated not to have more to show for it than a few succinct paragraphs.
Later chapters presenting the results of various reader response studies are interesting enough, but surely we could move more quickly to the results and their relevance to document design without spending so much time with dry narration of the actual empirical testing.
The theoretical section offers a long overview of theoretical approaches, arguing in favor of a rhetorical approach. Yet the chapters that go on to apply the theory offer advice and conclusions that hardly seem to warrant such a heavyweight theoretical foundation. For instance, the chapter on typography just offers familiar practical advice of the sort one gets in many introductory books on typography. The same is true about the long section about grids. All the opening theory favoring rhetorical approaches yields results that sound very close to the plain old common sense of the non-theoretical how-to craft school that gets debunked in the opening. So she does not end up making a very strong case for the value of her own theoretical approach, and we feel we waded through a lot of theory without much benefit.
In reality, I think she does have a case and she does have some good examples of how attending to the reader through empirical research can improve document design. But her ideas would be much more forcefully and usefully presented in 200 as opposed to 500 pages.
Terribly wordy - lots of deadwood.......2003-01-29
Sorry - I would not recommend this book to a TECHNICAL writer.
This book has 559 pages and could be cut down to maybe 100 pages of useful information. Each chapter has a full page explaining the chapter... if you have to do that, you haven't planned and written the chapter well. A good product sells itself.
It takes the author 5 pages in the preface to explain the book! It also has a lot of side head paragraphs explaining more... explaining the explanations. This book was painful reading for me... I kept thinking "bla bla bla bla bla"
This book seems to have a lot of the author's opinions and theory, but not very much practical information.
Book Description
Hip hop is today’s most influential and exciting musical phenomenon—and for the first time, all the greatest examples of hip hop and rap sleeve artwork are brought together to provide a history of this innovative and always- surprising music. Combining diverse artwork with exclusive interviews from major players of the rap world—including Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, designer Jeff Janks, and photographer and art director George Dubose—this lively collection is a must-have for hip hop and rap enthusiasts, design aficionados, and record collectors.
Customer Reviews:
Roll up your sleeeves........2004-06-08
You really know when a musical genre has arrived, when a book of cover artwork is published. Hip hop has been around for a couple of decades or more so Andrew Emery's colorful book is especially timely and can join the expanding shelf of titles devoted to great cover art.
As is usual with any book devoted to this marketing art there are plenty of the duds and forgettable designs but in the case of hip hop the very nature of the music produces some startling and vibrant graphics. Just turn over the first few pages and by page thirteen the socko 1983 album Wild Style jumps of the page, graffiti artist Zephyr created the beautiful lettering, page sixteen has a stunning 1984 Afrika Bambaataa cover based on a Marvel comic cover. The three hundred covers are arranged historically into ten chapters and the author writes about the various musicians and graphic artists who created so many of these covers, in particular George Dubose gets some good coverage.
I thought the chapter called Beat Biters was intriguing, as the music itself samples other sounds why not sample other covers as well, ten examples are shown including the 1991 cover from Young Black Strangers based on the 1963 'With the Beatles' album, a 1989 Tone Loc cover 'Loc'ed after Dark' was swiped from a 1963 Donald Byrd Blue Note LP designed by Reid Miles.
This book will interest graphic designers and fans of hip hop and all those who just want a record of the stuff they've missed.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
Book Description
The Graphic Design Reader features over 50 captivating essays covering an interesting panorama of design issues, as well as dozens of fascinating interviews and candid observations with the master designers who played a key role in shaping the identity, image, and formation of contemporary design. From the lost art of show-card writing and the tumultuous days of guerilla magazine publishing to the latest in electronic leaflet design and hot magazine covers, acclaimed graphic designer and author Steven Heller provides dozens of stunning examples of how graphic design has transformed from a subset of pop culture to a cultural driving force on its own.
Book Description
Edited by Claude Lichtenstein & Alfredo Haberli.
6.25 x 9.5 in.
490 illustrations
Average customer rating:
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Gefesselter Blick
Manufacturer: Lars Müller Publishers
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ASIN: 3907044029 |
Book Description
Edited by Heinz Rasch & Bodo Rasch.
6.25 x 8.25 in.
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German language only
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Graphic Design & the Bible Reader
Manufacturer: American Bible Society
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1585164720 |
Book Description
Snap! A day at the zoo can be lots of fun when you have a camera to catch the crocs, parrots, zebras, and other wild animals who live there. But what if your big sister is the photographer, and not you? Why, then you've got plenty of time to get into some mischief. But watch out! If you don't behave, the day may end early. Kids will especially enjoy the final picture, in which they have to try to find the feisty lead character.
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Books Index
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Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Theory of Fun for Game Design
Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture
Handbook of Computer Game Studies
