The world is busier than ever. One of the major challenges for brands is how to stand out from the competition: brands competing for market share, new brands that are being introduced, and indeed politicians fighting for attention in a crowded arena. The answer is certainly not to create more and more messages. Instead, brand managers should be able to craft 'polar' brand associations. This book shows how brands catch the eye by creating polarity. This goes further than just being different. It's a sophisticated technique to set brands apart from all other competitors in a radical way. This can be done by creating brand associations that radically split a competitive field into absolute opposites or are able to reconcile these in unexpected ways. Lightheartedly and with a wealth of examples, the book describes unique ways of guaranteeing that brands create a break through. Contrarian Branding is a must for brands eager to stand out from the crowd.

A journey through the acclaimed design studio’s effortless California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle   Design Commune reveals the evolution story of an acclaimed design studio rooted �rmly in the California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle. Truly multidisciplinary in practice, Commune has, since its inception in 2004, tackled all areas of design. The work featured in this second book highlights all disciplines that Commune engages in, including interior design projects for private and commercial spaces, artist collaborations, product designs, packaging, and graphics. Its projects share many common threads, such as the influence of handcrafted materials, but each remains deeply personal and unique.

Celebrating the rich, deep partnership between the British car industry and Italian design, this book is packed with coachbuilt cars, design classics and concept cars from the 1920s to the current day. The story starts with the early days of coachbuilt cars on separate chassis from illustrious marques like Bentley, Frazer Nash and Rolls-Royce, which were bodied by such Italian coachbuilders as Pinin Farina, Viotti and Zagato. After World War Two came the golden era of coachbuilt cars, with Italian companies creating some of the world's most beautiful shapes of all time on chassis from the likes of Aston Martin, Austin-Healey, Bristol, Jaguar, Jowett, MG, Riley and Rover. Then came the era when Italian carrozzerie morphed into design houses, penning shapes for mass-produced cars like the BMC 1100/1300 and Triumph Herald, and crafting what are widely recognised to be some of the world's most beautiful cars, such as the Aston Martin DB4, AC 428 and Lotus Esprit. Finally came the era of the 'concept car', with incredible show designs based on British marques such as Jaguars by Bertone, the BMC 1800 Berlina Aerodinamica by Pininfarina and Lotus by Italdesign. This book reveals the full stories behind the intense, diverse, sometimes surprising and always fascinating links between British cars and Italian design: the characters, the deals, the designs and above all the cars themselves. Over 40 British marques are included, from AC to Wolseley, and from major names like Jaguar down to smaller operations such as Jensen, TVR, Elva and Gordon-Keeble. These are matched by more than 40 Italian carrozzerie, from Allemano to Zagato. As well as major collaborations - such as Pininfarina and BMC, Michelotti and Triumph, Touring and Aston Martin - myriad never-before-told stories of small operators really make this book special: the likes of Frua, Boano, Fissore, Monviso, Sibona-Basano and Schiaretti. Richly illustrated with hundreds of period images, high-quality modern photography and dozens of sketches by the designers themselves - many never seen in print before - this is a book to relish for both lovers of design and enthusiasts of British and Italian cars.

These lush floral images, lovingly reproduced from a hard-to-find edition of a Belle Epoque classic, were compiled by a pioneer in Art Nouveau design. The 72 color plates feature full-page images, borders, and insets by M. P. Verneuil and other masters of the genre, including Bourgeot, Gaudin, Hervegh, and Schlumberger.

This book, dedicated to the history of design from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is committed to drawing guidelines for the development of this discipline, offering a synthetic vision of the subject and, at the same time, highlighting elements for future investigations. If it's true that the history of artefacts and objects has always accompanied that of man, punctuated by turns occurring with the acquisition of technological innovations, it is in the mid-nineteenth century that we can retrace historically the professional figure of the designer, thus marking the birth of modern and contemporary design. The subject is branched and composite, embracing many disciplines: in addition to the field of furniture - which often exemplifies the broadest lines of design research in an excellent way - other sectors are considered here, from technical objects to graphics, from fashion to car design. Particular attention is reserved for the influence of the art world, with all its array of thought references that has constantly permeated the birth of design projects.

A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers-Will Burtin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Gyoergy Kepes, among others-at a moment when designers enjoyed a new cultural prestige. Justus Nieland traces how, as representatives of the American Century's exuberant material culture, Cold War designers engaged in creative activities that spanned disciplines and blended art and technoscience while reckoning with the environmental reach of media at the dawn of the information age. Eames-era modernism, Nieland shows, fueled novel techniques of culture administration, spawning new partnerships between cultural and educational institutions, corporations, and the state. From the studio, showroom floor, or classroom to the stages of world fairs and international conferences, the midcentury multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their circle became key to a liberal democratic lifestyle-and also anticipated the look and feel of our networked present.

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for best biography or critical book related to crime fiction! A lavish full-colour celebration of the 2000 books by more than 250 authors published by the iconic Crime Club between 1930 and 1994. The Hooded Gunman was the sinister figure who, having appeared in various guises on the covers of Collins' various series of Mystery and Detective books in the 1920s, finally gained recognition with the launch of Collins' Crime Club, becoming the definitive imprint stamp on more than 2,000 books published by that august imprint between 1930 and 1994. From Agatha Christie to Reginald Hill, the Hooded Gunman was a guarantee of a first-class crime novel for almost 65 years, and those books are now as sought after and collectable and almost any other book series, with many commanding high prices and almost impossible to find. In the year that Collins - the publisher founded by William Collins in Glasgow in 1819 - is enjoying its 200th birthday, this book celebrates probably its most famous publishing imprint. Written and researched by Agatha Christie writer, expert and archivist Dr John Curran, this sumptuous coffee table book looks back at the history of the Crime Club and its authors, showing the jackets of every book published by the imprint over seven decades, and the descriptive 'blurbs' of every book, running to more than 350,000 words. With facts, figures and lists, and drawing on rare archival photos, correspondence and marketing materials, it is the first time that anyone has attempted to chronicle the publishing of the Crime Club - the ultimate book for fans of crime fiction and also of twentieth century book jacket design. The Hooded Gunman won the H.R.F. Keating Award for best 2019 biography or critical book related to crime fiction, and was also nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Design pervades our lives. Everything from drafting a PowerPoint presentation to planning a state-of-the-art bridge embodies this universal human activity. But what makes a great design? In this compelling and wide-ranging look at the essence of invention, distinguished engineer and author Henry Petroski argues that, time and again, we have built success on the back of failure--not through easy imitation of success. Success through Failure shows us that making something better--by carefully anticipating and thus averting failure--is what invention and design are all about. Petroski explores the nature of invention and the character of the inventor through an unprecedented range of both everyday and extraordinary examples--illustrated lectures, child-resistant packaging for drugs, national constitutions, medical devices, the world's tallest skyscrapers, long-span bridges, and more. Stressing throughout that there is no surer road to eventual failure than modeling designs solely on past successes, he sheds new light on spectacular failures, from the destruction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 and the space shuttle disasters of recent decades, to the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001. Petroski also looks at the prehistoric and ancient roots of many modern designs. The historical record, especially as embodied in failures, reveals patterns of human social behavior that have implications for large structures like bridges and vast organizations like NASA. Success through Failure--which will fascinate anyone intrigued by design, including engineers, architects, and designers themselves--concludes by speculating on when we can expect the next major bridge failure to occur, and the kind of bridge most likely to be involved.