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 styles––made up of words and phrases––are 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 object––from the simplest business card or product packaging to the grandest monument––must 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 business––by the expert, for the layman––for 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.