Richard B. Doubleday
Willi Kunz, Phantasmagorias: Daydreaming with Lines
For many students and designers, the beginning stages or entry point into a new design project most often makes us nervous with feelings of uncertainty. This emotional state or reaction can be stifling to the creative process and prevent us from making new things or thinking of new ideas in a natural way. Ultimately, the graphic designer is regularly pursuing pragmatic concepts, refining and solving graphic communications problems, and continually challenged to inspire, create new forms, and make relevant work in the practice of contemporary graphic design. When everything is considered, graphic design is about order and clear messages, inventing and revealing new ideas and sharing those personal views filtered through the state of one’s vision.
In Phantasmagorias: Daydreaming with Lines, Kunz demonstrates his methods for constructing compositions with lines and sets in motion a strategic guide to empower and inspire students to harness their creativity and establish a new path to creative problem solving and inventing new forms. He shows how personal interest is put into practice and assimilates his rationalization for the usefulness and reliability of modernist graphic design principles. Kunz’s design sensibility and specific design ideas are explored, offer insight, and provide the reader with ideas to encourage experimentation with lines and take command of one’s creative vision and spirit.
This book offers design students and practitioners numerous techniques for the formation of ideas and the creative use of lines to investigate form and the delineation of space within a two-dimensional field, while helping to build a strong design foundation. Through a series of design studies, readers will gain a better understanding of how one of the basic art elements—the line—is analyzed and explored to convey movement and mood, and unlimited possibilities. Kunz explains, “My books ‘Typography: Macro- and Microaesthetics’ and ‘Typography: Formation and Transformation’ were intended for typographic design education; they reflect my ideas and design principles. ‘Phantasmagorias: Daydreaming with Lines’ takes my personal interest in The Line further than previously discussed in my books.”
Phantasmagorias presents instructional examples, illustrated methods and well-documented repetitious visual studies to arouse inventive thinking and produce imaginative forms. This book sets out to identify, through a rigorous series of steps, the importance and creative recognition of the design iterative process. For design students and graphic design practitioners who are eager to understand the design process in greater detail, this book offers insight and inspiration to expand your creative capacity and express ideas more fully.