Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills Kindle Edition

This book is great at forcing you to move outside of the way you normally work to embrace something different. It might be helpful for designers and artists to look at this book as something that requires discipline to get the most out of it. That means you’ll have to make a commitment to working the projects and then set aside regular time in your schedule to do so. That’s not always in the wheel house of some artistic temperaments but if you make the commitment and follow through, it will be worth the effort. In fact, giving artists a foundation for regular self-development may be the best benefit of this book.

This is not my field of design (the book is more related to graphic design) but it had interesting tools that I can apply to my work. I got to make at last my personal logo :D!. Beyond that I read the book just making some mental resolutions of the design and comparing them to the examples developed by the participants. I have to confess many of them were quite specific and a bit boring as, then again, they are not related to my work. But I am happy to have read the whole book: it is useful.In the visual aspect the design seems a bit dated, and I include in this appreciation the cover of the book too.

Great book. Reminds me of taking art classes in college. This book forces you to do projects that you may not be comfortable with but will increase your artistic skills. Beautiful book.

Excellemt book!! Thorough, easy to follow and it addresses both technical aspects and the mental ups and downs of graphic design.

I do a lot of in-house design for marketing material production. Since I work in-house, I regularly do "similar" work and wanted to grow my abilities and learn some new things.This book offers a nice change of pace and offers projects to make you better at designing and applying new concepts to your current work.The "Challenges" are a nice balance of fun and difficulty, whose end result can nicely expand a portfolio with a variety of work.

This book has may good tools that can be used to generate ideas in an ideation workshop. Reader will find it handy and practical.

This book is a wonderful collection of activities to help to create and grow your design skills. I bought this book when I was leaving design school to help me to keep my imagination going even while being beat down by the man in the typical working environment of a graphic designer. These are also wonderful rainy day activities that could easily be adapted for having fun with the kids. If you are an art teacher, this book will rock your world and give you fun activities to peak your little students' minds! One of the first activities is to create a font from the things you see around you. The book gives the complete instructions on one page which makes for easy copies if creating for your class. There is also a time limit and some restrictions sometimes that make it challenging. There are also some suggestions to add difficulty for each project such as on the fly, making features larger or putting a background in or other random stuff that clients like to throw at you. All in all, this book rocks and is one of my favorites for times when I have spare time which unfortunately are very few these days but if all of the above stuff sounds good to you, you will not be disappointed.

I am really liking this book. It gives you concrete exercises in design, which are timed, which really makes them more effective as each exercise must be COMPLETED in a short time. I have learned a lot doing these exercises and would like to buy a Volume 2 of this book!! I highly recommend this book.

I cannot praise this book enough. Especially if you are a teacher of art and design, or a student. this book will give you plenty of exercises to think through and do - or give your students. They are graded in terms of difficulty and intellectual challenge and are useful for any level of learning.If you are an aspiring graphic designer, try some of these do them properly, record your workings in detail in a sketchbook (Your Lecturers and often your potential employers are often MUCH more interested in your process than the final product.) and you will end up with a worthy portfolio.If you are a teacher of graphic design, each one of these projects is a gem and will save you time and angst in developing stuff from scratch. That not to say you have to copy; I use them more for inspiration (I teach design in a large SW college) but they will get the grey matter moving and to top it all the author has written a teacher's guide that you can find on his website. Brilliant and throughly recommended.

This book was not what I was expecting at all, I was going to give it just one star but if you are a graphic design student (or teacher) it will probably be right up your street, hence 3 starts. I was looking for a book that covers the fundamentals of visual composition, balance, repetition, space, rule of thirds etc and exercises to put this knowledge into practice. Instead this book contains exercises such as creating a typeface, the effect of certain changes on a pamphlet, creating a greetings card and other similar exercises but very little theory that could be applied to art work.

Every designer needs a push every now and again, sometimes we get in a design rut doing the same old same old and do not push ourselves enough to reach the next level.This book challenges you to create new things and allows your imagination to roam free rather than being stifled by a client who has their own ideas and boundaries. This is like playtime but taken seriously can help you expand your ideas and push your designs. Some ideas are a little similar to other 30 day challenges found across the web but there is enough here to keep you active.

This book is a must for all Graphic designers newbies

Great value. This was a secret Santa gift and the recipient was very happy with this.