Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming

Legendary designer Ellen Lupton demystifies the creative process in another essential graphic design book. 

Graphic Design Thinking explores a variety of techniques to stimulate fresh thinking to arrive at compelling and viable solutions. Each approach is explained with a brief narrative text followed by a variety of visual demonstrations and case studies. Lupton's hands-on, close-up approach, made famous with Thinking with Type, makes the creative process accessible to anyone and removes the myth that creativity is an in-born talent.

Presents a wide range of methods applicable to any brainstorming scenario.

• Techniques are grouped around the three basic phases of the design process: defining the problem, inventing ideas, and creating form
• From informal strategies that are ideal for quick, seat-of-the-pants thinking, to formal research methods
• Learn to approach problems through focus groups, interviewing, brand mapping, and co-design

Includes discussions with leading professional designers. Art Chantry, Ivan Chermayeff, Jessica Helfand, Steven Heller, Abbott Miller, Christoph Niemann, Paula Scher, and Martin Venezk reveal how they get ideas and overcome blocks to creativity.

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Graphic Design Thinking is directed at working designers, design students, and anyone who wants to apply inventive thought patterns to everyday creative challenges in the design process.

Creativity is more than an inborn talent. It is a hard-earned skill that, like all skills, improves with practice. Graphic Design Thinking explores a variety of techniques --- from quick, seat-of-the-pants approaches to more formal research methods -- -for stimulating fresh thinking and solving design problems. Brainstorming techniques are grouped around the three main phases of the design process: defining problems, getting ideas, and creating form. Visual demonstrations and case studies show the design processes and solutions at work. Featuring best-selling author Ellen Lupton's hands-on, accessible approach to instructional writing, this most recent addition to the Design Briefs series will help designers create projects that satisfy clients, users, and themselves.

About the Authors:

Ellen Lupton is curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. An author of numerous books and articles on design, she is a public-minded critic, frequent lecturer, and AIGA Gold Medalist.

Jennifer Phillips is principal of J. Cole Phillips Design. She is also associate director of the Graphic Design MFA program at the MICA. Phillips coauthored Graphic Design: The New Basics with Lupton. She currently serves on the AIGA Advisory Board.