Pattern and Palette Sourcebook 2: A Complete Guide to Choosing the Perfect Color and Pattern in Design (Bk. 2) (Paperback)

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Product Description

A plethora of patterns and palettes!

This hardworking reference book is the second volume in Rockport's Pattern and Palette series. Like the first, it is an invaluable tool for art directors, designers, and students working in the fashion, product, and graphic design fields, as well as anyone in the business of visual communication.

With close to 1,000 new patterns, Pattern and Palette Sourcebook 2 is a desktop library of colors and patterns that address the professional's needs in working with harmonies and contrasts. Divided into six unique style sections, the book provides readers with fifteen appropriate colors for each section, which are then incorporated into twenty-five different patterns shown in six or eight color variations each. This enables readers to see the dramatic effect colors have in design and helps them understand how to use color effectively. The book also demonstrates ways of creating designs that are distinctly unique from one another yet hold together in a group.

Also included is an interactive CD ROM that contains the patterns featured. Users can choose patterns, experiment with colors, and print out a sample of the patterns for reference.

About the Author

A trained graphic designer, Heidi Arrizabalaga's passion has always been creating patterns, stationery, and wrapping paper, and presenting items in unique and creative ways. She owns and runs Heidi, a versatile collection of vibrant, coordinating paper journals, note sets, gift wrap, and accessories sold in 35 stores nationally and online at shopeheidi.com. Her company and designs have been featured in Instyle, Lucky Magazine,?Daily Candy, and elsewhere. Heidi lives in San Francisco, CA.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Rockport Publishers (February 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592533175
• ISBN-13: 978-1592533176
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #298,885 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The CD is a disappointment, April 10, 2007

By	Kat "K2A7T" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

I suppose I should have read the description more carefully. The CD doesn't have the pattern files. It is only a program allowing you to adjust the colors. I was really looking forward to having Illustrator files of the patterns.

On the up side the patterns do inspire and the palettes are wonderful.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not terribly useful..., October 22, 2007

By	Edward Raeker "PunkRockFarmHand" (Santa Monica, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is full of interesting and attractive color combinations and patterns but for some bizarre reason does not include vector files for the patterns shown - sort of like a cookbook that has beautiful pictures and detailed descriptions but excludes an ingredient list. This is such a shocking oversight that I wonder how it made it into print. Rockport is a consistently excellent publisher but they really missed with this half-effort. Useful only as a color reference.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very neat, but not very well designed..., February 10, 2008

By	R. Morozoff (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love the idea of this book very much. You get a palette group from which smaller palettes are made, and then patterns in which that smaller palette is used. It's a great inspiration tool, one I will probably use a fair bit. There are many colors in the book that I just love, and many palettes that were beautiful.

However, the book and, more specifically, the CD with it could have been better designed. I would have liked to see a better use of the patterns. The patterns didn't have a range of colors applied to them, but rather used the same number of colors. It would have been nicer and more useful to see two colors used here, three here, and four here, rather than just two here and all five or six here. I also would have liked to see the RGB values presented with the colors (or even just listed at the back of the book). As a digital artist, I use the RGB values far more than I do the CMYK values.

The CD was also poorly designed. The tool itself is a brilliant idea- getting to play around with the colors in the patterns yourself- but since it uses RBG to select colors and the book has only CMYK values, I have to get an extra tool to convert the CMYK values to RBG values to even use the palettes presented in the books. There's also no indication of what color you've selected other than the RGB values in the boxes, and that's probably helpful only to a very select few. The last issue I had was that some of the lines in the patterns were extremely small or thin, and since you're expected to click the part of the image where you want to change the color, this presented an issue.

I'm going to keep the book and enjoy it, but, honestly, if I had known what I do about it before I bought it, I probably would have skipped buying it. There are books that do the same things as this one does, but that have done it better.