The Education of a Design Writer

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From author and design expert Steven Heller, a guide to critiquing, explaining, and interpreting a piece of design for all who practice and observe it

Writing is designing, and writers are designers. Different writing stylesmade up of words and phrasesare just as important in describing a physical or virtual designed work as color, texture, and material form. The design writer must make the prose as necessary and exciting to read as a designed objectfrom the simplest business card or product packaging to the grandest monumentmust be to see and to use.

This book covers how and what to write when critiquing, explaining, discovering, introducing, and interpreting a piece of design. It is for the student or the expert, the novice or the professional, who seeks to best communicate with audiences. Examples of writing include a range of styles and disciplines, from journalism, scholarship, criticism, and businessby the expert, for the laymanfor publication in books, magazines, blogs, catalogs, and manuals.

Contents include the following:

• Writing Is Design
• Design Needs Words
• Forms of Expression
• Addressing an Audience
• Jargon, Pro and Con
• Writing on Graphic, Digital, Information, Typographic, and Product Designs
• Examples of Good Design Writing
• and much more!

Explaining design means being design literate and literacy means writing intelligibly and creatively. This book covers it all, for and through those who practice and observe design.

Author Bio

Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA Design program at New York's School of Visual Arts and writes a daily column for PRINT. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of more than 170 books on design and popular culture and in 2011 received a Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award. He lives in New York City.

Molly Heintz is a writer and editor specializing in architecture and design. Since 2015, she has served as the chair of the MA Design Research, Writing & Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts. She is a co-founder of the editorial consultancy Superscript, which has developed programming, exhibitions, and editorial content for a variety of institutions, including the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Arts and Design, and MoMA.