"Belles Lettres" is a wonderful, handy, writing tablet. The paper is thick and accepts roller ball ink very easily. I use a fountain pen and find that the ink flows readily onto the thick receptive paper. The tablet has handy elastic corner holders to keep the tablet closed when not in use. This is useful when storing other loose documents. I am a reporter and I use this tablet wherever I go.

The small-statured Counter Culture by Steven Heller and Louise Fili may too easily be missed on laden shelves, but is packed with a colorful survey of commercial culture examining how mini-mannequins and other counter displays both created art and appealed to consumer interests. Color photos of these mannequins pack the pages.

I am a student studying graphic design and found this book to be very helpful in my classes. There are many fully colored pictures of the actually art work and limited text. I enjoy this because I am a visual person and learn by seeing. This book is by far one of the best I have seen.

Design Humor is an exploration of humor and its use in graphic design provides a quirky history, from the first satiric cave drawing to more modern efforts in humor. Visual puns, exhibitions, designer concepts and examples of comical design forms provide an invaluable, lively guide.

As a design student, it is very important for me to have an understanding of design history. Heller, being one of the most prominent design writers, has produced many of my favorite books. Thia book not only discusses a period in design history, but is itself designed well. This book covers a fascinating period in Dutch design, and includes many beautiful color images. I have often recommended this book, as well as many others by Heller, to friends, who are also designers. If you find this book enjoyable, I would also recommend similar books by Heller, which cover nearly the same period in other countries. Try out German Modern and French Modern perhaps.

Essencial for reflection on how the graphic design can learn and make a better world.

It is a given that people take design for granted. So it is not surprising that many people have adapted to the rich multimedia interfaces they encounter each day. What is surprising however, is that the design community is only now just reacting to this shift and is struggling to cannonize "E-Design". It would seem that the design world is no different from any other sitting monarch reluctant to budge. If you are diving into 'E-Design', then you no doubt have noticed that the traditional design community fears you. This book was written with you in mind. It is the manifesto to the revolution. This collection of wonderful essays comes straight from the cutting edge thinkers in desgin today--some of them professors, who delight in throwing out references to critical theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. This book is long overdue and I am delighted to have found it as it helps to define the importance of E-Design in the future of design. Natalie Zee's writes, "Digital designers are at the forefront of the industry, those that are helping to define the dicipline, and those that are creating all the innovative interactive experiences...They are Design Technologists."
For all those traditional designers who don't take E-Design seriously, please read this book. As Charles Traub puts it in his essay, "The advent of the computer did not create the technical tangle of multimedia, but rather manifests a pre-existing need in our culture for a more democratic, universal, and diverse way to communicate."

Heller has written many books on this similar theme, that is a particular design period (deco) in a certain country. German Modern is one of the best. Covering many of the flourishing design movements in Germany around the deco period, there is much to be said in this book. Heller does a fabulous job at creating interesting text combined with beautiful imagery. A must have for design historians.

Heller is, as we all know by now, the preeminent graphic design writer of our times. This work displays the history of graphic design in simple, bulleted lists arranged by category in a chronoligcal arrangement that is as elegant as it is simple: each year gets its own spread (though earlier , sparses, years are two-to-a-spread), with reproductions of work from the year and stats on important developments in design, illustration, photo, and more, as well as the people who are responsible for such work.

Not a book to be read all at once, but to be enjoyed sporadically, leafed through, glanced through before bed... a must-have for the design history enthusiast.

A handsome book of 270 book jackets clearly showing the very wide range of styles publishers used to sell their wares. All the covers are shown complete with the designer's name in most cases, none of them are angled or overlapped, thankfully! A lovely feature is the use of still life photos of the book and the jacket complete, many of them with tears and creases on the jackets, looking as if they have just been rescued from a second-hand bookstore.

These jackets are such a contrast to the covers shown in a book I recently reviewed, 'The Great American Paperback', a colorful collection of six hundred covers (annoyingly designed so that they nearly all overlapp each other) from the forties, fifties and sixties. These covers are extremely conservative in their design approach, a predictable painting with crude typography for the title. It was not until the mid-sixties that paperback publishers turned to eye-catching paintings and photography with intergrated typography.

In contrast the covers in 'Jackets Required' are bursting with creativity, the chapter on non-fiction has some particularly striking designs. The back of the book has a portfolio of six designers including my favorites, Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand. There is a designer and title index, someting that was sadly missing from 'The Great American Paperback.

Heller and Chwast have produced a super book that design students and fans of popular culture will enjoy for a long time.