- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Joost Elffers Books, New York; illustrated edition edition (30 Sep 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1556709625
- ISBN-13: 978-1556709623
- Product Dimensions: 24.9 x 24.4 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 635,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design displays an entertaining array of the most ingenious, stupid, beautiful, and horrible visual solutions that instruction designers and illustrators have invented to help us handle modern technology and everyday products.
These works of art show us how to floss out teeth properly, where to insert the printer cartridge, which button to press to transfer a phone call, how to use chopsticks, how to open a milk carton, and how to exit the plane in case of an emergency landing. Open Here also includes a diverse sampling of images: the finest cut-away drawing of a truck's diesel engine, a revealing expanded view of a model airplane, and detailed full-color photographs of a sewing machine in a 19th-century manual.
Open Here also includes an overview of the basic elements of visual instructions: the baffling yet remarkable drawings, cartoons and symbols that tell us where to cut, where to twist, how to repeat, and also how not to do all of the above.
About the Author
Paul Mijksenaar is designed the signing system for Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, New Ark airport in New Jersey and JFK in New York City. He is a professor of Visual Information design at the University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands.
Piet Westendorp is a researcher at the Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology in the Netherlands, where he specializes in technical communication.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
I bought this book for my first uni brief and I found it very nice and usefull for having an inspiration: there are lots of examples and pics!
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is not one of those 'How to design instructional material for Dummies' books (if it was I certainly wouldn't own a copy) but a beautifully designed and printed book with hundreds of illustrations and diagrams showing how designers have attempted to explain, mostly visually, how we should handle everyday technology. Not only technology but simple stuff too, page eighty-seven shows the instructions, usually printed on tissue paper as I recall, on how to complete one of this little wooden puzzles you can buy in arcade shops, this one is for a camel.
Instructional design is serious stuff, a matter of life and death in some cases. The fold-out on page forty-seven shows forty-one examples of those emergency exit and life jacket cards you find in the seat pocket facing you on a plane. Although they all provide the same information, the type of illustration and layout is different in each example.
Simple instructions can be the hardest to put across, just how do you depict, in a simple visual way, the action of washing out your mouth with a glass of water, page 126 shows how with a profile of a boys head and four arrows describing a circular motion printed on his cheek, his hand holds a tilting glass with the water.
Here is a lovely book for graphic designers to leave on their coffee table.
Instructional design is serious stuff, a matter of life and death in some cases. The fold-out on page forty-seven shows forty-one examples of those emergency exit and life jacket cards you find in the seat pocket facing you on a plane. Although they all provide the same information, the type of illustration and layout is different in each example.
Simple instructions can be the hardest to put across, just how do you depict, in a simple visual way, the action of washing out your mouth with a glass of water, page 126 shows how with a profile of a boys head and four arrows describing a circular motion printed on his cheek, his hand holds a tilting glass with the water.
Here is a lovely book for graphic designers to leave on their coffee table.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Infodesigners are a truly creative bunch, capable of creating an impressive variety of infodesign books. There's Richard Wurman's paradigmatic Information Anxiety, and Follow the Yellow Brick Road, then Tufte's series of severely elegant books, and then, then there's Mijksenaar, now with Piet Westendorp. I called (in a review for amazon.com) Mijksenaar's first book on Instructional Design a design manifesto. This time, Mijksenaar and Westendorp succeeded in creating an entirely new category of information design books: the infodesign cabinet of curiosities. You can also think of it as the poetry of information design. Again, theory is not the forte in this book, but then it is not meant to be. The book is a fascinating source of informational imagery, which can be read in different ways. You can approach this book in a fairly serious way, and learn quite a lot (mostly through you own efforts) or else you can approach it with a more leisurely mind (as I am sure most designers will) and delight in the glowing successes and abject failures of the visual instructions so profusely exemplified. A designer colleague snatched the book from my hands and said 'This is really cool'. I think so, too. Get the book, it is really fun.
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