flatnessisgod [Paperback]

Ryan McGinness (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1999

Ryan McGinness, a leading downtown artist and graphic designer, shows how design works, through process, logo development, basic design studies, portfolio work, and experiments, flatnessisgod is made to be an art object in itself. It rides the line between art and design.

Product Details

• Paperback: 212 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; 1 edition (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887128344
• ISBN-13: 978-1887128346
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,877,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE NEXT WARHOL, September 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: flatnessisgod (Paperback)

flatnessisgod - things you can do with lines and dots, crowns and shredding, mixing clip era media with social commentary by the strategic placement of graphic elements. logos, logos, logos. the next warhol of sorts? perhaps. the next saville? some would say. but what is reinvented by ryan's work is an intellectual mysticism that can affront, obey, and even disregard multicultural values in one solitary statement. this book is full of em. brilliance with relevance. not an easy thing to achieve, but mcginness has done it... again and again.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What your design should be more like, November 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: flatnessisgod (Paperback)

McGuiness tells the designers of the world to stop for a few brief seconds and consider the melange of visual stimuli that we wade through every day. He both shows us how and asks us why we so easily idendify with the vernacular. The ideas in this book are simply and effectively illustrated and serve as a modern suplement the other great graphic design references such as Gregg Barryman's Notes on Graphic Design.

19 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars mediocrityisprevalent, January 18, 2001

By 

"ryin" (bellingham, washington) - See all my reviews

This review is from: flatnessisgod (Paperback)

well, where to start. i'm glad i didn't buy this book, it's a complete sham, which may very well be the point - but it's completely superficial, and insulting to real graphic designers and design students to pass these exercises off as a touchstone of modern design principle. the dadaist overtones are not lost on me, but the straight forward design solutions are just that - straightforward, highly derivative (IF NOT TRITE), and quite frankly, boring. if this is the present and future of design, we're in serious trouble. i'm the biggest proponent of thumbing my nose at established design, but you have to know who you're thumbing it towards. breaking from the past requires a knowledge of that past, i see no evidence of such hind- and/or fore-sight in this book. it's been reiterated ad nauseum that picasso was probably the finest draftman of his day, if not history. point being he didn't simply begin with cubism or collage. i fear that the computer has caused such a horrible deterioration of the design process, that this book is what the masses will consider 'good' design. unfortunately those masses include potential clients and students who are our future designers. for those students i recommend beale, lustig, hoffman, rand, lissitzky, malevich, mondrian. go to the source, otherwise you've resigned yourself to a future of luke warm, rehashed gruel. eat up kiddies, hope you choke. this doesn't deserve any stars in my opinion, but as a matter of default i must give it 1. designers are not rock stars, but this guy is the equivalent of britney spears - all filler, literally and figuratively.