Design School Confidential: Extraordinary Class Projects From the International Design Schools, Colleges, and Institutes [Hardcover]

Steven Heller (Author), Lita Talarico (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2009

Every great design school in the world is defined, in part, by the work of its students at any given time. The various project challenges given to a class determine the success of a school’s pedagogy, but also the ingenuity of its faculty and students. This book features fifty real-world class assignments from top design programs at universities around the world, and examines the resulting student projects. From undergraduate to graduate work and basic class challenges to final thesis’s, students delivered a wide variety of graphic and multimedia design projects from print to motion to exhibition. The book has three functions: 1) To exhibit a wide range of challenging problems and successful solutions. 2) Provide practical models to be inspired by and learn from. 3) Examine how sophisticated design school projects are and what value they have in relation to real-world practice.

 

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steven Heller and Lita Talarico are the co-chairs of the MFA Design program at the school of Visual Arts. They co-authored Design Career (the first handbook for designers and illustrators) in the 1980s and Design Entrepreneur for Rockport. Heller is the author, editor, or co-author of over 120 books on design and popular culture. He is a former senior art director of the New York Times and currently writes the Book Review's "Visuals" column. He is a contributing editor for PRINT, ID, EYE, Baseline, and frequent contributor to Metropolis. His website is www.hellerbooks.com. Talarico is the former founding editor of American Illustration, was Reporter-at-Large for Graphis, and has been a director for special initiatives in design and architecture at both Purchase College, SUNY, and the Cooper Union. Talarico holds an M.F.A. in Art Criticism and Writing.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Rockport Publishers (October 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592535488
• ISBN-13: 978-1592535484
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #378,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Steven Heller, author and editor of over 130 books on graphic design, satiric art and popular culture, is the co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is also co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism, MFA in Interaction Design, MFA Social Documentary Film and MPS Branding programs. Although he does not hold an undergraduate or graduate degree he has devoted much of his career to fostering design education venues, opportunities and environments.

On the editorial side, for over 40 years he has been an art director for various underground and mainstream periodicals. For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times (28 of them as senior art director New York Times Book Review). He currently writes the "Visuals" column for the Book Review and "Graphic Content" for the T-Style/The Moment blog (http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/author/steven-heller/). He is editor of AIGA VOICE: Online Journal of Design, a contributing editor to Print, EYE, and Baseline, and a frequent contributor to Metropolis and ID magazines. He contributes regularly to Design Observer and writes the DAILY HELLER blog for Print Magazine (http://blog.printmag.com/dailyheller/). His 135 books include "Design Literacy, " "Paul Rand," "Graphic Style" (with Seymour Chwast), "Stylepedia" (with Louise Fili), "The Design Entrepreneur" and "Design School Confidential" (both with Lita Talarico), "Iron Fists: Branding the Twentieth Century Totalitarian State", and the most recent, "Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig."

He is the recipient of the 1999 AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement. His website is www.hellerbooks.com and his blog, The Daily Heller sponsored by Print magazine is http://imprint.printmag.com/daily-heller/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Visuals but not the content I was looking for, October 22, 2009

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T. Lucas (Kingsville, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Design School Confidential: Extraordinary Class Projects From the International Design Schools, Colleges, and Institutes (Hardcover)

This book has wonderful visuals and gives great ideas to launch from for classroom projects. It gives the instructors ideas for what developed the project and goals for the project. The student examples are strong and should be helpful to communicate ideas to my students. The book is good to see what other instructors are doing around the country and the world. However, it is not in the same league as Elisabeth Resnick's book "Design for Communication." Her book gives much more detail that a first year instructor needs or anyone new to teaching a course in the field of Graphic Design. I am happy to have "Design School Confidential" and will use it for generating new course material. Would I buy it again, probably not.