Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212013 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Synopsis
Combining a wide-ranging discussion of the major issues of design with detailed and practical information, Norman Potter explores the possibilities and limits of design, considers the designer as an artisan and as artist, and asks: "What is good design?" The volume seeks to prompt its readers to think and act for themselves. First published in 1969, it is reissued to present the enduring core of Potter's arguments. An afterword by Robin Kinross sets the work and its author in their contexts.

Customer Reviews

In Context
This book was first published in 1969, and as such needs to be read as a historical document from a particular point in (design) history. There is much of interest in this book if you have the patience to find it. Joyfully under-designed and coming out of one of the best design publishing companies in the UK, Hyphen Press, it is an important text in the history of design writing and should be read as such. If you're prepared to dig a little deeper, then it actually contains some ideas about design education which make design education establishments today look positively conservative.

Pretentious Drivvel
This book is needlessly long-winded, incredibly pretentious, glaringly irrelevant, and actually quite patronising.
I've only lasted unilt chapter 5 (although I intend to continue reading from cover to cover as it is on my Reading List for St. Martins) but if the book continues in this pointless way I will feel like I've wasted hours of my life being told what I already know in the longest, most achaic fashion possible.
Let's have a little taster:
"Even 'judgement', that wise old word, becomes ponderously inhuman unless fertilized by some order of creative spontaneity"
Want more of this?
Then by all means spend a tenner on this little gem of a book.
If like me, it's on your reading list... well I personally wouldnt bother, maybe there's some money in creating a synopsis of the points raised in the simplest wording possible?