I have had the book creative sparks on my shelf for about a year now, I thought it would come in handy when I hit a creative lull. When I bought the book it was on one of my book sprees. I bought 8 or 9 design books ( $300.00). I opened this book and saw 2 or 3 exercises like making a mask another was using a desktop scanner to scan interesting objects. Now in glancing at the book I thought there would be a lot of exercises like this. The book is 310 pages filled with the obvious.

Examples of Content:

So what do you do if your layout hits a rough spot? " Try changing the font size on the header".

I have been working on a project for hours and I am getting no results, what do I do? "Get up and take a walk around the block".

The nuggets of wisdom that take two pages for instance; "A layout or piece of art is finished when nothing can be added to boost the message and nothing that takes away from the message remains". This nugget is paired with the recipe for the "Perfect Martini".

By the numbers:

310 pages

18 artistic assignments / projects

24 Life practices or motherly advice for a healthy designer

268 pages of designer common sense.

By the Design:

The book is a great example of good lay out and a cool style for every page. The book may be nice to have as an example layout design.

Content:

Nothing groundbreaking! In fact this stuff should be obvious habits for professionals. If Designers are not already doing this they are not designers. I Really felt this book was low level "well duh" type stuff. I do not think it is irrelevant but ,it is a book that I would give to a Design Student. This book is a good foundation. But for anyone in the industry it is pretty elementary.