Customer Reviews

MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer

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Hillam Curtis, veritable Flash mavens as they are, show less interest in spewing out a snazzy graphic-design treatise or a 'Web Graphics for The Rest of Us' series of tips stash on how to make your designs ooze sex appeal.

They offer instead a rather refreshing and long overdue thoughtpiece on 'New Media' design that is not confined to the web. Our world has obviously chugged along since the days of whimsical DHTML and the other Nielsenesque extreme of prosaic "usability for everything", and we now have truly new mediums, modern technologies that need increasingly intelligent designing for.

This book presents some of the most practical, common-sensical ideologies to deal with such new-fangled challenges. Several philosophical elements of creative design are discussed, and while such rhetoric may not be everyone's bag, the writing is real-worldly and intuitive enough to be engrossing.

What makes it an outstanding book though is the smart undercurrent of design as an art of 'problem solving', with its primary agenda of identifying and meeting goals that target users expect from the medium they interact with.

You won't find tips, techniques and code snippets here except when inevitable to illustrate an idea. When we discuss color for instance, we talk about the affective influences of colour on people, not Pantene decimals or the spokes of a colour wheel. Discussing typography is not about quaint typefaces or font sizes but about leading the reader into the information, aiding and facilitating communication. The illustrations are fresh, exciting and for anyone related to design, veritably inspiring.

Is this required reading in graphic design courses yet? It should be. It certainly could be. A highly recommended reading for anyone in the business of design.

In the dim dark early days of the Web a then unknown author combined personal anecdote, design insights, HTML code, layout tips and website samples into a unique book that became a bestseller over the course of two printings.

That book was David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites, and Hillman Curtis' MTIV is an admirable successor to the first Web bestseller. MTIV does not contain quite the same mix of stuff as its predecessor, and that's a good thing, as the Web and our understanding of it has changed since Siegel's time. Foremost is the fact that Flash has now assumed an importance that plain vanilla HTML once held.

Curtis the Flasher of Renown.
Hillman Curtis is one of the best and most famous Flashers on the planet. He is the Flash designer who first started using the term motion graphics for what he was doing in the early days of Flash, and he is the first Flash author I've read who emphasizes story, story, story as the motivation and prime mover of what he does. In fact he is possibly the first well-known and well-respected designer who has had the guts to come out and say such a thing.

In a rerun of the legend of the blind men and the elephant, people have perceived the Web as they want to, based on personal interests. Hence technologists seeing it as a technology problem, IT (IS, for North American readers) specialists see it as an IT solution, programmers assuming it is a programming exercise, traditional graphic designers seeing websites as a collection of pages like those in a book, and corporate marketing communications types treating websites as online brochures.

They are all partially right. Websites can be some or all of these things, but the Web itself is about communication and storytelling. In its short history few people have perceived this fact, and even fewer have pointed it out in public. Bravo Hillman.

Putting It Into Perspective.
Put it all into perspective, place the web and the Internet up there alongside all the other new communications technologies that came before them, consider what they're all there for and it becomes dead obvious - storytelling. Myths, legends, cave paintings, the written word, telegraph, telephone, radio and TV, and the digital media - they exist for the transmission of tales.

MTIV reminds us of that fact and more. Its subtitle is Process, Inspiration and Practice. In the Inspiration section Curtis shares some of the works by artists works in non-digital media that inspire him, and in Process he explains the practices that have made his firm such a success - Listen, Unite, Theme, Concept, Eat The Audience (you have to read to understand it), Filter and Justify. What he shares in Process is enough to justify the cost of the book.

In Practice Curtis hands the story over to some guest experts for the telling, and they include Steve Krug on usability, Jeff Southard on XML, The Rooster Design Group (the book's designers) on print, Leatrice Eiseman on color, and Ellen Shapiro on grids. All good stuff and worthy, but I have more of the same in many other books.

Let's Improve The Naming Of The Parts.
I like that Curtis calls himself a New Media Designer and to what he does as New Media Design. Paradoxically, although New Media Designer is as ambiguous as competing terms like Multimedia Designer, Interactive Designer, or plain old Digital Designer, the former is more open and allows for endless possibilities.

The Web itself keeps changing. Digital technology continues to evolve. The roles that New Media Designers take on will continue to mutate. Hillman Curtis himself has designed for other media including print, directed and designed video projects, and created all kinds of marketing and advertising products, as well as the things you'd expect an innovative Flash expert to have done, all under the name New Media Designer.

I think we should all follow Curtis' lead, and be done with inventing new titles for what we do. New Media Designer is good enough for me. So are Hillman Curtis' processes as a designer, and I will be adding his personal inspirations to my own...

if you find yourself in a design rut lately, pick up this book! not only did this book inspire me, it reminded me of why i chose to be an interactive designer in the first place. i always love reading how other designers get their doses of inspiration, and this book not only helps you go "behind the scenes" of a talented designer, but it also focuses in on key design principles from different design mediums such as print, motion graphics and video. it's definitely motivated me to start working on motion graphics projects again!

Let me tell you why I bought this book: I'm a self-taught designer, and I do what Mr. Curtis does - New Media Design. I create web sites, Flash, multimedia, video, and more through my company Wicked Penguin.

I've bought many books on software and technical aspects- ColdFusion, Flash, XML, etc. However, what all those books lacked was one simple word: INSPIRATION. Yes, they told you what buttons to push, what code to type, etc. But what is all that worth if you don't have great ideas and a good way of getting them across to people?

That's where this book comes in. First off, it's great to know you're not alone when it comes to having difficulty finding that right idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but finding a GOOD idea is no easy feat. This book encourages you to find ideas anywhere, whether it's in movies, print, old posters, etc. As long as you arrive where you need to be, it doesn't matter how you get there.

Secondly, as a designer who went to art school, I've never been schooled in business practices - the art of the deal, so-to-speak. While I feel I'm adept at the design part, it's the interaction with the client that's always been somewhat of a challenge for me. This book opens doors to new ways of approaching clients, particularly by stressing a "you're all in this together" theme.

Mr. Curtis' style of writing is excellent. He presents an idea, delivers a related anecdote or story, and then brings it home. It's a blend of theory and practical experience that can immediately make you see what he's talking about.

This book is not for those who want a nuts-and-bolts instruction on Flash programming, or web design. This is - in its essence - a philosophy book. If you're looking for in-depth line-by-line breakdowns of SQL database queries, walk away.

As I said, I've bought tons of web and media design books. This is the only one that ever made me go "WOW".

This is definitely one of the best design books I have ever read. The approach is honest and thoughtful; a nice change of pace from the usual congratulatory and often pompous style with which a good number of design books seem to be plauged. This book has beauty and substance.

In this book, Hillman shares his inspirations, methods, and experience (the title DOES say it all) in a way that seems to not talk at you, but with you. I love the layout, the tone and convention, and the pretty pictures =).

No, this is not a how-to book. It will not teach you how to use the basics of Flash, nor will it teach you how to how to create a web page. It is not the place for it. It will however, teach you that even great designers face roadblocks, and how to overcome them. It will open you up to a new perspective on design if you allow it to. I think this book, very successfully, did what it sought of to do. If you don't agree, maybe you should read the title again.

Don't buy it if you are looking for procedural how-to's to design. Do buy it if you're into honest approaches concerning design.

I was lucky enough to have a friend get a copy of this book for me and have it signed by Hillman Curtis just 4 days ago. I've already read it once, and plan on reading it more than one more time.

Similar to Hillman's first book (Flash Web Design), MTIV discusses business practice, how to conduct yourself in meetings, the philosophy of design, etc. Also, similar to the first book, MTIV has a section devoted to "learning," but not as step-by-step as the first book. A number of well known designers contribute at the end of this book short sections on different areas of design: typeography, XML, HTML, print, and much more.

I highly recommend this book not only to both beginners and advanced Web Designers but also "non designers" who want a good resource on business practices, helping clients, and developing solutions that don't just "look cool" but also deliver functionality and answers.

As a design student, I was recommended to read this book by numerous friends of mine who have graduated from the program. I am a second-year student without a lot of real-world design experience, and reading this book still hit very close to home.

This book is divided into three sections: process, inspiration and practice. The first section, process, outlines the way that Curtis has learned to relate to clients. His writing style is well organized and his voice is easy to follow. He uses personal stories as a way to connect to the reader rather than using "design-speak".

The second section, inspiration, is a visual showcase of some of the people who inspire the author, and some of their strongest works. Many of these are motion pieces, so translating them to print poses a slight challenge. Curtis selects multiple frames from each piece that are representative of the story being told, and lays them out in a way that still conveys the meaning of the piece, making sure to describe the action that occurs so that the reader is as informed as possible without actually being able to view the piece.

The final section, practice, is more of a tool to the new designer than to those with more experience. It is a guide to the ins and outs of design from a basic html overview to the usage of a grid in print design. For this section, Curtis invites other professionals that he considers experts in their respective fields to write individual essays. He provides this as a response to the lack of basic design literature that he ran into when he started designing many years ago.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The third section in particular seems geared toward younger designers, but anyone in a creative field would be able to gain from the client interaction guidelines listed in the process section or the imagery and ideas in the inspiration section. I highly recommend it to anyone.

and paid the price. Here's my take on it.

Process. Hillman Curtis makes good points about identifying and listening to your audience. Also he warns us, don't get too wrapped up in your design; remember it is the client's web site and their objectives come first.

Inspiration. Curtis recounts several tales about how he gets inspired; but after a few weeks he realizes his "flash" just isn't serving any real purpose, so he goes back to basics. Curtis' claim to fame appears to be the design of the Adobe web site. You decide - is the Adobe web site a source of inspiration for you?

Practice. In this section Hillman defers to other notable web authors, including articles by Joseph Lowery and Steve Krug. These authors are good, but I already have their books. There is also information in this section by other authors on type, font and color. It is all very basic. For example, an entire page is devoted to identifying 12 colors (count em, twelve) as either primary, tertiary or secondary. As an added bonus, red is identified as warm and green as cool.

The slick pages in this book make it too expensive for what you get in return - a glossy photo of Chris Hillman on the cover.

I'm just starting to learn about design, reading online and checking some books at the library of my college. This book is a great help because it does tell you the key fact that all ideas are there, borrowing is ok to transform something into a new well crafted thing,and you can find inspiration in many, many ways. Many useful information, tips, quotes, in general, I'm gonna buy this book for my collection.

As a Medill New Media faculty member at Northwestern University, I've been searching for the perfect text to support my class on online storytelling. Hillman Curtis has finally put the write combination of inspiration and technology, along with new media definitions together. Our class focuses on the content and Hillman never forgets this. His talent for finding inspiration in the obstacles and limitations in new media design/development are the techniques I strive to give my students. Thank you Hillman - a great book in every way!