Customer Reviews

Japanese Design (Dover Pictura)

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I just over paid for this book at Barnes and Noble, but after looking at it fully, I'm tempted to just keep it, instead of returning and buying here on Amazon, because i'm that satisfied with it as a source of inspiration. I have a much older Japanese clip art book that is simply blk and white illustrations. This addition is a good addition to the blk/white because it offers not only design possibilities, but color options as well. As a designer and artist, I'd give this the thumb's up. The stock paper used has a quality feel to it as well, which is welcome after the cheapy feeling paper used in the older Dover clip art books.

This is one of Dover's premium "Pictura" design books, meaning it's on the high end both in price and presentation. The book itself is beautifully printed and the graphics on the CD-ROM are higher quality than Dover's "standard" books. However, I was disappointed to find that there is no bibliographic information whatsoever. Granted, most of the items are simply patterns or snippets of artwork, but there are many full woodblock prints and pen-and-ink paintings and it's disappointing they don't tell you who the artist is or the date/period the artwork came from. Ironically Dover's lesser books (like the woodblock prints book) do contain this information; I don't know why they didn't include it here.

Because of the lack of bibliographic information this book is probably more appropriate for scrapbookers. However, unless you need a lot of Japanese-themed artwork, the book's premium price should make the casual scrapbooker think twice.

If you are creating a scrapbook of a vacation in Japan and are looking for lots of high-quality patterns and graphics, this would be a good resource. For art students or fans of Japanese artwork who care about the information behind the image, you should look elsewhere.

This book includes very few traditional or vibrant images. Most are dull or uninteresting.