Before & After®: How to Design Cool Stuff

Chapter . Introduction

This book, like the two before it, is a compilation of articles that first appeared in our magazine, Before & After, How to design cool stuff.

Before & After, for you who don’t know, is a magazine that teaches graphic design. A better way to say it would be that it’s a magazine that explains graphic design, or illustrates it, because we don’t teach in the sense of conducting a formal course of study, where skills are learned in a sequence, each building upon the last.

What we do is show it, typically with a reallife project, and explain what’s going on—why these colors go together (or not), why this object must be bigger than that object to convey thus-and-such a meaning, and so on.

Some people get this kind of instruction ...