Graphic Design Thinking: How to Define Problems, Get Ideas, and Create Form

"A 'must have' in the design arsenal."—Cat Normoyle, Professor of Graphic Design, East Carolina University

"Provides enough thinking techniques to break out of even the worst creative rut."—Creative Woman's Circle

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.

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.

Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, curator and educator. Her books include Indie Publishing, D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips), Design Your Life (with Julia Lupton) and many others. She is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Her articles and illustrations have appeared in Print, I.D., Metropolis, the New York Times and other publications. She received the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2007.