Customer Reviews

Grammar Of Ornament

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones is a highly regarded design classic, first published in 1856 and just as relevant today. The DK edition is a pleasure to examine (although you may need reading glasses to see the six-point type for some captions). The small format fits well in the hand and has a nice heft (504 pages at 1.3 inches thick). The paper is superb and the colored inks for the thousands of engravings brilliant and crisp. If you need a version that lays flat on your drawing table or a scanner bed, however, this one has some drawbacks. The images are very tight to the inner margins, and the glued binding difficult to keep open without breaking the back. That aside, the DK edition is beautiful and a great buy.

This book was first published in 1856 and is a design classic! Owen Jones was born in 1809 and is a key figure in the history of British design. He was an architect and designer who taught in London during the 1850s.

He traveled in Europe and the Near East, were he helped to bring back ideas to improve the quality of Western design. This collection is a result of his comprehensive analysis of patterns. The sumptuous illustrations are presented in these sections:

Ornament of Savage Tribes

Egyptian Ornament
Assyrian and Persian Ornament
Greek Ornament
Pompeian Ornament
Roman Ornament
Byzantine Ornament
Arabian Ornament
Turkish Ornament
Moresque Ornament from the Alhambra
Persian Ornament
Indian Ornament
Hindoo Ornament
Chinese Ornament
Celtic Ornament
Mediaeval Ornament
Renaissance Ornament
Elizabethan Ornament
Italian Ornament
Leaves and Flowers from Nature

The original Preface to Owen Jones's original folio edition has been preserved and included. The general principles in the arrangement of form and color are listed so you can see which are advocated throughout this book.

If you are interested in reading about over 2,350 classic patterns (color engravings representing a vast range of ornamental styles), this is the book for you! More than likely, you will gravitate to one form of the other and concentrate your reading efforts on those sections.

The actual pictures are all numbered and the mediaeval section is especially beautiful.

Iain Zaczek has contributed to the commentaries in this work. He is an art historian and has written on a wide variety of subjects. He is also the author of The Essential William Morris, The essential Art Deco, and the Art of Illuminated Manuscripts.

~The Rebecca Review

I was disappointed when I first received this book. I had bought it as recommended reading for my design course and ordered it blindly. I don't know what I had expected but this wasn't it. Then, one day, I pulled it off my bookcase, looking for information on a certain type of design - and suddenly found myself enthralled with the beauty of this book. Let it not fool you, it's a beautiful little gem packed with design and information. Not a centimetre wasted.

I have the thin booklet as a reference to the CD, which I purchased some years ago. If you do Webpage design this CD is a must have. Unlike other CDs of Grammar of Ornament this one has the images in EPSF, JPEG and PDF form. Others I've looked at only had PDF and that doesn't do me any good. I've used Fireworks from Macromedia's Studio MX Suite to make backgrounds and buttons for webpages made with Flash and Dreamweaver. If you can get your hands on this CD or any of the other CDs Direct Imagination has created, do it. I do think Grammar of Ornament is the best of all the ones Direct Imagination produced. Having the book for reference with it is handy, but if you can only get the CD alone, do it anyway. After a while you just know which plate has which graphic.

Be warned that there are no illustrations whatsoever in the paperback edition of this book published by General Books. There's really no point to this book without the illustrations. The item description is not clear at all and does not specify that there are no color plates in the paperback. The item description is for a digital version of the book and the "look inside" is for a full color edition. These need to be listed as separate items to avoid confusion.

Don't trust the photos.

Like JamesB Said:

This was an OCR scan copy and that the OCR is full of garbage pages.
This doesn't contain any of the COLOUR prints for which this book is so well known.
This doesn't contain ANY prints at all - and is consequently utterly devoid of purpose.

A total waste of money

Before purchasing I would have wanted to know that:
This was an OCR scan copy and that the OCR is full of garbage pages.
This doesn't contain any of the COLOUR prints for which this book is so well known.
This doesn't contain ANY prints at all - and is consequently utterly devoid of purpose.

A truly comprehensive gutting of an important design work, a visual reference without any visuals, a waste of paper. Congratulations Amazon.

Ok, its beautiful, the colors are stunning, its all rather lovely, well articulated with notations, but the text and images are itsy-bitsy! I believe that the "search inside preview" is actually bigger than the book itself. And that's the conundrum.

If you are looking for pure details for specific styles, this book is for you. If you are looking for overviews or full pictures, this may not be for you. If you are into design, I think it is a great resource to put on your shelf!

I WILL REPEAT A REVIEW, LIKE IT WAS MINE:

Before purchasing I would have wanted to know that:
This was an OCR scan copy and that the OCR is full of garbage pages.
This doesn't contain any of the COLOUR prints for which this book is so well known.
This doesn't contain ANY prints at all - and is consequently utterly devoid of purpose.

THANKS AMAZON!