Colour Mania [Paperback]

With all due respect, neither Amazon (which has not provided any blurb) nor previous reviewers (up to the date of my review) have explained what this book is about. For that matter, it's a book that I had been deliberating whether to buy or not, and in the end I decided to take a punt on it.

Colour Mania is a reasonably sized book (a touch smaller than A4) showcasing/highlighting collection of works covering campaigns, branding, identity, typography, promotional designs, advertising, corporate brochures, annual reports, ephemera, business cards, stationery, posters and even interior designs and some exhibition material (such as stands). It does not cover any online projects.

The work covers companies (big and small) and designers (well known and relatively new) from all over the world, which gives it a nice perspective and ensures a good range of examples. The book is divided up into 10 different colours - yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, green, brown, black and mutlicolour. It appears that the "chapters" are based according to the dominating colour of a project. When you get the book, you have to go through it and fold out the tabs (which are at the beginning of each section) that you can see in the screen shot above (a process that takes a few minutes). A list of the contributing designers is written on the back cover and the last section of the book dedicates a few pages to them too - each getting a short paragraph biography.

The reproductions are reasonable and on good quality paper. Personally, I think the book would have been better if it was bigger as some of the images are small. Most projects are dedicated a page of coverage, although a few do get two pages. There doesn't appear to be any obvious reason why this is. There is also a small amount of text accompanying each product, but given that this is just a few sentences spaced over a few lines, don't expect any detailed analysis. There are credits to designers, origins, illustrators and clients. For your money, you get 300 pages of good design examples.

Overall, I think the book was reasonably priced for the [...] I paid for it and it is something I will refer to again. Are the designs and campaigns classics? On the whole, I don't think so, but then that's always going to be subjective. Will the book give me ideas - yes it will, but will it truly inspire me? Who knows. There are other similar books out there and I'm not convinced Colour Mania is offering anything truly novel. Its difference from its competitors is the fact it is sectioned by colour, but it does do a good job of this.

I'd recommend this book to design agencies and marketing teams. On a personal note, I'd have preferred the book to be categorised by area, such as brochures, exhibition designs, business cards etc as that would have made for better comparison. Ultimately, I think this is more of a 'nice to have' book as opposed to 'must have'.

***UPDATE MAY 2012***

I've bought a few books looking at examples of corporate branding through my work (and reviewed some of them on Amazon). I would buy Color Mania and Brand Identity Now!. Together, these two books should be sufficient to help provide inspiration for your corporate branding needs. Google and Google Images are cheaper alternatives.

A great book to own, every time you go through this book you will find something you didn't notice before!
Great inspiration! especially for me as I find it hard working with colour!

Just buy it! One of my best ref book purchases. All broken down in to colourised sections, easy to reference. A great collection of creative graphic design to inspire.