Eva
Interaction of Color is comprised of two halves. The first half of the book contains the main text and is printed in black and white. The second half consists of color “plates” which showcase specific examples from the main text, along with some supplementary text of its own. This format requires keeping two bookmarks—one for your position in the reading, and one for the corresponding illustrations some 100 pages later. For a book devoted to the study of color, this is baffling and mildly infuriating.
I suspect this format is held over from the book's original 1963 edition, when printing a full color book may have been prohibitively expensive. To blindly adopt this design over 50 years later is an unfortunate oversight.
Albers's writing seems directed more toward teachers like Josef Albers and less toward people like Josef Albers's students. It instructs readers why colored paper is best for classroom projects (mixing paints and textures is distracting), why to restrict a certain project to vertical strips of color only (shapes are distracting), and which brands of acetate sheets to buy (“Zip-a-tone,” “Artype,” and “Cello-tak”).
Like a true academic, Albers's tone is pretentious and dry. Oddly, he seems to love inserting line breaks at arbitrary points. He may fancy Interaction of Color a work of poetry, but I'd really rather read text with a predictable line-length.
Form and format aside, the content is quite good. At its original publishing, Albers's work was revolutionary, and it still holds its own in 2017. Interaction presents novel ways of interpreting and applying color, it's opened my mind to colors and color combinations I may have dismissed previously. If you're a designer, Interaction of Color is a book worth adding to your collection.
Regrettably, nowhere in the 50th anniversary is there a mention of how to apply these techniques to screen design for digital designers like myself.
I would love to see an updated edition—or perhaps a new book entirely from one of Albers's students—which corrects the issues listed above, goes beyond staged classroom examples to point out meaningful uses of color in the real world, delves into the differences between print and screen, and overall makes the book more practical and approachable without losing Albers's pioneering spirit.
There's not enough writing about the intersection of design and politics, so I had high hopes for this “(Not So) Global Manual”. The Politics of Design is full of single-page anecdotes, and feels more like a collection of lightly-researched blog posts than a serious printed reference. Most of the book is dedicated to pointing out cultural and political missteps that have been made by designers in the past, but there are no guiding principles to link these stories together into something actionable that designers today can use to improve their own work. The book ends abruptly after one anecdote, without a conclusion.
There are several typos, printed references to pages on Wikipedia, and pages where text color contrast almost certainly does not meet minimum accessibility requirements—a spectacular oversight for a book that dedicates an entire section to color and contrast. Overall, formatting feels sloppy: text is misaligned, margins are painfully tiny, fonts and colors seem chosen at random... I can't tell if this is brutalism or just poor design.
All that said, I did learn a few new things, and the entire book can be read in one sitting. I'd like to see a second version of The Politics of Design that approaches these topics more seriously, backed by more research, and with more consideration toward the design of the book itself.
I would rate this 10 stars if I could. Highly, highly recommend for any friends creating art in any form—this book is a crystal clear reference about “the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.” Totally unpretentious. Funny and concise, to boot. I will be returning to this book often.
Seven Brief Lessons is neither here nor there. It's not poetic enough to inspire, yet not detailed enough to be instructional. It's marketed as a beginner's guide to physics, yet leaves major concepts unexplained (despite finding it appropriate to include certain complex mathematical formulas), grasping at once in every direction, and thus in no direction at all. Includes a long, winding tangent at the end about how the world is doomed. Flashy book cover, though.
5 stars for content, but 4 for presentation. The results are thorough, but the writing is dry—more engaging than a research paper, but I wouldn't consider it enjoyable past a mental exercise. Also, graphs are often labelled extremely vaguely (“high” vs “low”, “more” vs “less”, etc). I understand this was done in the name of simplicity, to show the correlation between graphs and between concepts, but really? I think most of us can read and interpret a numbered graph. As it stands, the reader has no idea whether a graph represents 5% of the scale of something or 100%.
Nonetheless, the research is intriguing, and The Spirit Level is a solid factual resource to back up assumptions that most of us have always shared: we are most happy and healthy when we live as equals with our peers.
Cover art, you wronged me for the first time. Stay away from this b-rated horror “thriller”. Wearisome characters and disjointed, tactless writing makes this 300-page read a chore. The plot doesn't get going until page 200 or so, and at that point, you care about the characters so little, they could all expire and you'd feel no grief. But hey, at least it looks pretty on the bookshelf.