Robert Klanten

I didn't think it was possible to dislike a book about picture books, but I guess there's a first time for everything. I'm sure this book will be enjoyed by many people, but it didn't appeal to me. I didn't like most of the illustrations, and I didn't recognise any of the books featured. The purpose of Little Big Books is to highlight artists and their contribution to the world of picture books. This is achieved through the artwork itself, brief biographies and occasional interviews. There's show more also a very strong focus on European artists. While I do enjoy the artwork of picture books (though obviously not these illustrations), I am interested in the stories too, and rather hopeful of rediscovering an old favourite. Neither of these were a feature of this book. I also prefer my biographies to be more than a list of books published, and the artists' alma mater.
Because I wasn't enjoying this, I didn't finish reading through the text and just skimmed through the illustrations instead. So it's probably not fair to rate it. show less

Today's television is packed with programs featuring crime scene investigation and their ubiquitous scenes of autopsy and forensic medicine. Existential questions about life and death are no longer only addressed on the philosophical level of Hamlet's famous soliloquy, but in drastic images. Splatter, horror and the Gothic are not only making their comeback in TV or in movies, but are influencing the current style of editorial design, illustration and photography.
Against this background, show more Black Magic/White Noise presents an unsettlingly fascinating collection of visuals that deal the physical and the psychological as interpreted by contemporary designers from around the world. The book seduces its readers into a conflicted world filled with chillingly beautiful illustration, photography, graphic design, collage, painting and installation. The title's "black magic" is represented by images of darkness, mystery and horror. Its "white noise" describes the unexpected infiltration of the irrational into broad daylight that can be found in some of the included works and that we have come to know and love from films by Alfred Hitchcock or books by Haruki Murakami.

Not for the fainthearted, Black Magic/White Noise is a potent cocktail of the drastic themes and motifs that are being used and finding widespread acceptance in today's creative disciplines and design. show less

We're inundated with small data, big data, complex data... lotsa data. And the data is THE story; it should be front and center. Data Flow depicts hundreds of stunning data viz examples. The book is aesthetically beautiful. However, several of the diagrams suffer from low data-to-ink ratios (lots of paint, little useful data)... and many are illegible and printed too small to see or require specific domain knowledge to decrypt.

Where's the data? The book proselytizes the importance of data show more and there ain't much raw data to be seen (or linked to).

The book designers have forgotten to treat typography as the visual hierarchy for words, the interface design for text. The type treatments and layouts are difficult to read.

Designers, engineers, statisticians, and decision-makers need data viz guidance. This book is not an academic dive into data visualization and needs to follow several of it's own rules for displaying information. But this book provokes your imagination. show less

Beautiful book with examples of infographics and interviews with the designers. I would have given this more stars, but I had a hard time reading the text in the book.