Finamore Design

Jeff Fisher of Logo­Mo­tives with How Pub­lish­ing just pub­lished Iden­tity Cri­sis: 100 Redesigns That Trans­formed Stale Iden­ti­ties into Suc­cess­ful Brands which show­cases recent iden­tity rebrand­ing work for as vari­ety of indus­tries. This book acts as a guide design­ers can use to show their clients the power of rethink­ing and redesign­ing their identities.

Iden­tity design (logos, let­ter­head, web sites, etc.) is one of the most pop­u­lar top­ics in design books, and Iden­tity Cri­sis takes a fresh look at this com­mon sub­ject by explor­ing the process of redesign­ing exist­ing iden­ti­ties to help busi­nesses refine their images, com­mu­ni­cate with cus­tomers, and find suc­cess. Read­ers will get an inside look at the chal­lenges of redesign­ing iden­ti­ties. They’ll see the cre­ative and strate­gic think­ing behind fresh design work as well as have a pow­er­ful tool to show clients what a dif­fer­ence a pro­fes­sional can make to their image.

I am also happy to announce that one of Finamore Design’s re-branding projects, New Triad for Col­lab­o­ra­tive Arts is fea­tured in the book.

Steven Heller does it again! He is cred­ited with author­ing, co-authoring and edit­ing over 100 books. While I per­son­ally own quite a few from his library, this new addi­tion (pub Feb­ru­ary 2007) is one of my favorite.

In this book Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic ana­lyze fifty great pieces of graphic design (posters, books, cat­a­logs. music pack­ag­ing, logos, brochures, etc..) and ded­i­cate a spread per piece to explain why these designs res­onate with us and what about the design makes them great. Then each spread has a gate fold where they show sam­ples of his­toric design work (includ­ing cap­tions explain­ing why) that prob­a­bly influ­enced the artists.

They believe that graphic design­ers are “pack rats” con­stantly stor­ing design ideas in our brains for later use. They do not guar­an­tee that all of the influ­en­tial pieces were def­i­nite moti­va­tors for each piece. They are just edu­cated guesses. And who else to make those guesses than the co-chair of the MFA Design pro­gram at the School of Visual Arts?

Keep ‘em com­ing Steve!

Do you find it dif­fi­cult to “Think Out­side The Box?” Not sure what it is going to take to suc­ceed in a cre­ative posi­tion? Or pos­si­bly just curi­ous about what it is that those peo­ple in the cre­ative depart­ment do on a day to day basis? Paul Arden, Exec­u­tive Cre­ative Direc­tor for 14 years at Saatchi&Saatchi-UK, has writ­ten two books that spell it all out for you. These are full of his the­o­ries on cre­ativ­ity and suc­cess based upon his per­sonal expe­ri­ences and backs them up with sto­ries and quotes from his job. They are small, light, and easy to read with sim­ple cre­ative lay­outs and imagery that back up each idea. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did.

These books are a def­i­nite asset to any busi­ness per­son, cre­ative or not, who wants to score extreme suc­cess. These books are well writ­ten, extremely insight­ful, and fun to look at. I find these two books work well together, while GUT focuses on how to lis­ten to and under­stand your gut instinct, BALLSY gives you the skills you need to act upon these instincts. (more…)

This book is full of moti­va­tional sto­ries about uncon­ven­tional places where some of the world’s great­est ideas have been spot­ted. These sto­ries are inter­min­gled with small easy to com­plete exer­cises that are guar­an­teed to stim­u­late your cre­ative juices and open your mind to the pos­si­bil­i­ties that are sit­ting right in front of you. This book is a great resource for any­one in any field that realises their cre­ativ­ity could use a boost.

Art Chantry’s work is a per­fect exam­ple of how to send a spe­cific mes­sage through a sim­ple coher­ent design. Peo­ple who do not know of him will look at his work and label it retro-punk when in fact he is one of the found­ing fathers of this style of design. Undoubt­edly he cre­ates his work using a com­puter these days, but his career began in the pre-tech era and to this day his work does not carry that heavy-handed computer-generated look that so many new design­ers today have.

While this book is tech­ni­cally on my Book­shelf it also falls in the Smile­File cat­e­gory. I have been drawn to opti­cal illus­tions and visual trick­ery ever since I was a lit­tle kid.

This book explains the why, what and how of the “Mas­ters of Decep­tion” like; Guiseppe Arcim­boldo, Sal­vador Dali, San­dro Del-Prete, M.C. Escher, Scott Kim, Shi­geo Fukuda, Rob Gon­salves, Ken Knowl­ton, Octavio Ocampo, Roger Shep­ard and more. (more…)

I hunted used book­stores and scoured the web for this book about four years ago. It turned out that this book was out of print. I finally man­aged to find it in a used book­store in a sub­urb of Chicago and hap­pily bought is for approx $25. Just recently I recently found out that this book has been re-issued in paper­back form, and can be found in most major book­sellers. Accord­ing to the author’s web­site: “The new edi­tion con­tains about 98% of the 1992 edi­tion, plus about 25% new mate­r­ial: many new ambi­grams, sev­eral new essays, plus a 16 page color insert fea­tur­ing a num­ber of my word-illusion paint­ings. It also fea­tures a new Fore­word by Dan Brown, a com­plete and thor­ough his­tory of my ambi­grams, a sec­tion show­ing my favorite com­mis­sioned ambi­grams, and a “How Ambi­grams Are Cre­ated” sec­tion.” (more…)

You know it’s going to be a good book when you see the AIGA logo on the spine. Nor­mally I do not hes­i­tate when I see that lit­tle back square with the four white let­ters, but for some rea­son this book eluded me for two years. When I was in the mood for another brand­ing book it wasn’t on the shelf, or when I did see it there, some­thing else caught my eye. This book had been rec­om­mended to my by so many peo­ple that I finally had to go out and buy it.

While most books on the sub­ject of brand­ing cover either the left brain or the right brain approach, Marty explains in easy-to-read eng­lish just why it is so impor­tant to bridge the gap between these two hemi­spheres and attack brand­ing with both sides work­ing co-operatively.

Start­ing by explain­ing what brand­ing is not, he then pro­ceeds to work his way through what it is, how to do, why it is impor­tant, and how to test is what you want to do will actu­ally work.

There is a quote on the book that can not be bet­ter stated:

“Read this book before your com­peti­tors do!” —Tom Kel­ley, gen­eral man­ager, IDEO
The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier was orig­i­nally pub­lished in 2003. This expanded edi­tion now fea­tures a 220-term brand glossary.

Finally, some­one wrote this book so I don’t have to. I know that most design­ers are like me, they want to spend all their time cre­at­ing good designs for good clients. But the truth of the mat­ter is that aside from being a good cre­ative, there is a fair amount of busi­ness acu­men design­ers must acquire, wether they plan on free­lanc­ing, work­ing full-time, or run­ning their own agency. In this book Shel Perkins spells out every aspect of busi­ness for every type of designer in a lan­guage that is easy to under­stand. (more…)