Book Review: Colour Forecasting

In our experiences, people are very curious about the world of forecasting. The research driving the fashion and textile industries is very complex, highly intuitive and frequently underestimated. Colour Forecasting is a great book for anyone curious about the field and looking to learn more.

The book discusses forecasting’s origins, the driving forces behind fashion and how it’s evolved in present day. Color terminology and some of the more subjective tools used by color forecasters are explained, and their strengths and weaknesses are compared. Additionally, process models are presented, revealing how forecasting methodologies are used to develop ‘color stories’.

November 17, 2011 | By: Shayna Kulik

Book Review: D&AD 2011

As 2011 heads steadily toward the New Year, people start to think about the holidays and review the past twelve months. With that in mind, for this week’s book review we have up for offer D&AD 2011, which feature’s the year’s best creative work. The D&AD awards panel judges over 20,000 works from design studios, ad agencies, branding consultancies, film production agencies, digital media pioneers, and other creative firms from all over the globe. Winners receive the legendary D&AD Yellow Pencil Award—or in the case of exceptional and outstanding work, the rare Black Pencil Award. This review of the winners serves as a one-stop-shop for everything that’s hot in the field. Anyone interested in creativity, communication, design, or advertising would love to have D&AD Annual for their coffee tables and book shelves.

November 10, 2011 | By: Shayna Kulik

Book Review: Mapping Patterns of Information

Our ability to generate and gather information now exceeds our capacity to understand it. Researchers, scientists and designers around the world have been working to make sense of the multitude of today’s complex networks. Using innovative mixtures of colors, symbols, graphics, algorithms and interactivity, they have managed to clarify, and often beautify, the clutter. Some may say that this process can be seen as creating the syntax of a new language. Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information was conceived and created to be the first dictionary of this new lexicon.

Showcasing and analyzing the variety of contemporary visual depictions of complex networks, the book also covers their historical predecessors, grounds for recent popularity, as well as exploring the ramifications of a new age of infinite interconnectedness. From representing networks of friends on Facebook to depicting interactions among proteins in a human cell, Visual Complexity presents one hundred of the most interesting examples of information-visualization by the field’s leading practitioners. Click here to purchase.

November 4, 2011 | By: Shayna Kulik

Book Review: Brand Thinking

We live in a world with over one hundred brands of bottled water. The United States alone is home to over 45,000 shopping malls. And there are more than 19 million customized beverage choices a barista can whip up at your local Starbucks. Whether it’s good or bad, the real question is why we behave this way in the first place. Why do we telegraph our affiliations or our beliefs with symbols, signs, and codes?

Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, by designer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, contains twenty interviews with the world’s leading designers and thinkers in branding. The interviews contain spirited views on how and why humans have branded the world around us, and the ideas, inventions, and insight inherent in the search. The style and format of the book make this an interesting, informative, fun and thoroughly thought provoking read that design and branding lovers, newbies, and information junkies alike are sure to find enjoyable. Images via Core77

October 28, 2011 | By: Shayna Kulik

Book Review: Art and the Invention of Color

Last week I found myself in Rhode Island driving quite a bit and listening to WBUR. I was struck by a story on the invention of color and the origins of this book. The content’s quite relevant and I wanted to share:

To many people, the wide realm of color is relegated to the artistic corner of inquiry. Now that we can synthetically pull any hue out of our hats and tweak it to the finest degree, we’ve collectively forgotten the roots of color and the manner in which we have created pigments for millennia.

In Phillip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, we are brought into the folds of the fascinating history of color, and how the creation of pigments and dyes has had a lasting influence on art, fashion, merchandising, and the textile and chemical industries. If you have ever wondered to yourself “what exactly is color,” than this is the book for you. Ball clearly and enjoyably takes you through the ages and advances in pigment creation and describes how these steady achievements in color creation has affected contemporary society.

October 20, 2011 | By: Shayna Kulik

Book Review: Hand/Eye Global Color

HAND/EYE is an independent, international publication created to explore the nexus between design and development, culture and commerce, art and craft, and environment and ethics. Their latest issue focuses on one of our favorite topics- color. Global Color is comprised of 72 pages of photos and stories, offering insight into the symbolic importance of hue across diverse cultures. Photos via 2Modern

October 13, 2011 | By: Shayna Kulik