Game Design Books

The idea of creating a couture bridal gown goes far beyond what you can find in this book. It has many illustrations of bodices, sleeves, skirts and trains throughout the process of creating the designs, and gives the basics of slicing your ordinary sloper to create bridal stylelines. In that, it is great for the patternmaker. You can see how bustles, portrait necklines, leg o'mutton sleeves and stays are updated to be used in today's bridal fashions. The section covering the boned bodice has many diagrams to help you visualize where the seams and darts are placed. There is minimal information on the construction of the bodice as well. The book also tries to touch on the construction of a head-dress (veils, tiaras, headbands) and offered rather skimpy information on the subject.

As it says on the cover, "Pattern Layout and Design." That is all you will find worthwhile in this book. If you are not an experienced seamstress with pattern drafting expertise, this book is not for you. "Patternmaking for Fashion Design" by Helen Joseph-Armstrong is an excellent book to start with, and will teach you all the basics you need to create your own styles. "Couture Bridalwear" is a supplement to my library. It is one of the few books available on the subject, but I was hoping for much more than was covered here.

I bought this book and it really is one of a kind. It shows step by step how to make a pattern for almost any kind of bodice or skirt. This book kicks ...!!! Sew go buy it!!!!!

It is hard to find books that raise the level of an experienced sewer's knowledge. This book will do it. This is not a book on technique, but a book on manipulating design--what bridal customers all want. This book will help a special occasion couture seamstress put together a truly unique wedding gown design by addressing the planning stage before cut out of fabric.

To make your own, or somebody elses, wedding dress you have to know how to make the pattern. This book tells you how to make up a pattern in any style starting from a basic bodice, sleeve and skirt.
For me it's the book I needed. I had my training in patternmaking, but it's the basic and the daily casual wear for women.
Now I can make the pattern for the wedding dress I like.
It's easy written, but I think the knowledge I have about patternmaking makes it more easy to understand.
It's a great supplement to my libary.
I also had my traing in sewing garments, but sewing a wedding dress, I think is quite a different cookie. So I need another book next to this one. So that will be my next buy. And it will probably be "Bridal Couture" by Susan Khalje.
In The Netherlands it's hard to find books to expant my knowledge about these subjects so I'm very pleased to find them even it's in another language.

After reading the other reviews of this book I was expecting something more, more creative designs, fresher designs . . . just something more. After thumbing through the book I didn't really find anything I was super-excited to get started on. I have another of Kooler's books (555 Patterns for the Young at Heart) which has some adorable designs so I was expecting something more along those lines. This book has some nice designs, though nothing struck me as being really fresh, new or inovative. I would look into some of her other books before purchasing this one, or check out 2001 Cross-Stitch Designs: the Essential Reference (Better Homes and Gardens) for a great book with a huge variety of motifs that can easily be stitched on a weekend project.

This is a collection of small cross-stitch projects, many of which are perfect for gifts. The book's chapters are organized by type of project--eg, Designs for Baby, Designs for Mugs, Designs for Towels, Designs for Bookmarks, etc. Although not all of the designs are pictured as finished products, the charts are clear and simple enough to allow you to imagine the finished version. The designs are beautiful without being complicated (ie, not a lot of half-stitches or backstitching). Some basic alphabets are also included to customize your projects. Overall, this is an excellent book for beginning and other cross-stitchers who enjoy small, manageable projects and who like giving their work as gifts.

Donna Kooler is the most wonderful of all for cross stitch projects. I just love this new book, I can't wait to do some of these projects that is this book. I think Donna is the best of all of the other I tried. Each projects are easy to read and fun to do.

This book is wonderful. The color choices are beautiful and soothing and the small items make the projects enticing to start. I bought the book and immediately made 3 things (bookmark, stitch-a-clip, and keyring). Usually I plan to make items and it takes a while to find the time to start or finish. This is a great book for any crafter!

Hi Jeremey thank you and all affliated with the design and information provided in the book! For those who don't know Jeremey was a teacher at my college, Virginia College in Birmingham. He really helped me convey my inner thoughts of how to actually create something. I was stuck in design limbo for a long time till his teachings changed my life forever! To all involved with the work on this title it is our first book and hopefully we will have many more from VC our students and teachers are some of the best! Congrats!

It took me two years to write this book.
If you do not understand basic design principles this is the right book for you.

I found this book a little disappointing. If you already have a basic knowledge of Colour theory and know about CMYK & RGB, raster and vector images then this book may be too basic for you. It has173 pages with about 36 in colour. I found this quite annoying particularly when the author was talking about the effect of colour in a screenshot and the page is printed in black and white (grayscale) - so you can't see what he is talking about unless you go to the website yourself.

I learned some new things but I don't think it is enough to rate this book any higher than a 3.

I teach web design at a community college. Our biggest teaching issues aren't technology skills -- most students pick those up easily, and there are literally hundreds of technical books around to help -- but design skills. It's very hard to make a group of technology students care about color, type, and all the details that make a page communicate visually. There are other books that attempt to fill this gap (Robin Williams spring to mind) but no book has really done it WELL. This book has. I was worried asking my students to buy 'yet another' textbook with costs skyrocketing, but this book is a worthwhile investment. If you don't understand design basics is the place to start.

This is my first Missing Manual book that I've read through. I'm sure that humor is something difficult to perform in a step by step text. Still, as the text droned on and on with too limited a vocabulary, I found myself fighting harder to make it through this book.

The lady author did make a joke here and there, in fact I think about every 70 pages there was a joke or two until later in the book. Somewhere in the 300s, the lady changed her vocabulary from simple explanations to simple explanations with some American slang in between. The sentence with 'muff' was my personal favorite in the book. That sentence flowed so natural, I felt as if she was talking to me in a conversation. After that, it went somewhat downhill with slang she didn't seem well adapted to, and later getting better toward the end of the book. Other than lack of vocabulary, she took nearly a hundred solid pages and used 'she' instead of 'he' in her sentences. English wise, she 'muffed' up. A better choice would have been 'individual' or 'person' or if she so desired 'dude' or 'dudette'. In that case, the slang would have been obvious, and loose rules would be applied.

As far as teaching, the book does provide the necessary information to use Flash to produce an animation, basic web page, or an animated GIF. There are a few notable shortcuts given, such as #Static, which were worth the last hundred pages you made it through to read them. Actionscript is very lightly covered. It seemed that she was tired of this book somewhere in the middle of the 300s, which is understandable, as I was tired of the book at least thirty pages before it was obvious the author was. Covering Publishing, Publishing Profiles, and Exporting was well done excluding her PICT explanation where she didn't explain dpi(dots per inch) or postscript, which was definitely not any of the prior options of gif, jpg, or png which she compared the export PICT option menu to.

The book also makes many references to programming, but seems bound by the presentation and audience of the book to achieve that depth. This book would have been better if the times when the author found herself bored, she consulted a thesaurus to vary the vocabulary.

Even though I've spoken of some annoyances, the missing manual book does it's job. Flash 8 basics to intermediate usage was taught. The step by step instructions were simple and easy to understand. There is enough explaining to understand and learn what is going on. While the book does fail to achieve and maintain an 'interesting' status, the book succeeds in it's objective to be a simply understandable guide to Flash 8.

Are you a Webmaster who has given up in frustration because of distracting and annoying elements on your sites? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Emily A VanderVeer, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that explains all of the tools and shows you step-by-step how to create animations from scratch; as well as, why you want to do each step--in English, not programmer-ese.

VanderVeer, begins by guiding you through the creation of your very first Flash animation, from the first glimmer of an idea to drawing images, animating those images, and testing your work. Then, the author shows you how to manipulate your drawings by rotating, skewing, stacking, and aligning them; add color and special effects, and multimedia files such as audio and video chips; slash file size by turning bits and pieces of your drawings into special elements called symbols; and, create composite drawings using layers. Next, she shows you how to add ActionScript actions to frames to create automatic effects and to buttons to create audience-controlled effects. Finally, she focuses on testing, debugging, and optimizing your animation.

This most excellent book will show you tips and shortcuts for making Flash easier to work with; as well as, making your animations as audience-friendly as possible. More importantly, this book is designed for readers of every skill level except the super-advanced-programmer.

The book dissapoint me at the begining because i consider the contents to be too soft, like totally for beginners, I thought "oh no, I just bought another "flash for dummies" sort of book, where you get told how to use tool by tool, but not how to put everything together, the keys of how to actually create a professional flash website. But I totally start to enjoy the book from episode 10 where the author explains how to control your animation with actionscript. It happen to be very clear and useful to me.So, yes, i would definetly recommend this book to everyone who wants to start to get into flash. Not for Medium-Expert users anyway.

However, the quality of the illustrations that are used as examples are of really poor quality. So if you are looking fordward see pretty graphics not purchase this book. And it's in black and white too.

As per usual, the Missing Manual line hits another solid ball with Flash 8: The Missing Manual, but this time it's not out of the park. Packing 14 chapters and nearly 450 pages with solid material and great writing like you would expect from this line, I cannot do anything but give five stars for the writing and instruction. Unfortunately, when one opens the book and finds that there isn't even a SINGLE color page in the entire text, this is big mistake. If this was a book that covered something like Word or Excel (except for any graphs that might be used) this might not be such a bad thing, but for something like Flash where the entire premise is flashy graphics, smooth animations and crisp, clean vector graphics, to not have any color at all is a mistake. If you want to use Flash you cannot go wrong with this book, but this major decision faux paux I consider a huge fumble and it's the only thing stopping me from giving my usual Missing Manual 5 star rating. Hopefully this can be improved in the 2nd edition or with Flash 9.

**** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is a good overview for people who are familiar with project management but haven't worked in the Computer Game Industry before. The focus is on console games, but the book does references the MMO industry as well.

My second review...YAY....:D. Anyway, i bought this book for my Intro to game development class and it did pay off. I was reading though it and it really gives you an idea of what all types of games there are, who made them, and in depth explanation of them. Really good book for learning about games and game management.

Now to shipping....:D
Amazon has probably one of the fastest shipping out of all the companies that i have visited. And also for the money, they are good. So don't be afraid of buying from them. They really a good company!

I'm currently a student at the University of Baltimore, and our teacher required this book as our main text, its a very nice book. The information is laid out to make sense. Each chapter starts by telling you what the main points of the chapter is, so you can jump right into the section that you specifically want. Its also not a big book, its thin but filled with great information. Its also very light to read, it has pictures, and small paragraphs, and in each section there is one page paragraph or two written by those who are in the industry, giving advise from their real world experience about the particular topic the chapter is on.
I never thought I would ever say this, but my summary homework for this book is actually fun to do. =)
Enjoy.

The book is great for an introductory course on game development and has a lot of info about how a game was (it talks a lot about the past and how it was done bofore) and how it is now developed, from the early stages up to the final ones. It covers many aspects that a project manager needs to know that are specific for the gaming industry, so it is great to get the "big picture" of the gaming industry... but it lacks some depth in some aspects that are covered "very quick", that's why i substract a star. It also has a lot of nice "tips" from great game developers, that's a nice plus.

This book is great for teaching the basics of 3D modeling even if you know nothing at the start. It can be somewhat hard to find the buttons that the author is talking about in 3ds Max 8 but once you do everything follows along with the book perfectly.

Todd Gantzler has put together a very comprehensive book for video game art with 3d Studio Max. He covers from the top to the bottom of creating scenes. From the basics of texture mapping, advanced placement with UVW unwrapping modifiers, procedural modeling, box modeling, the author covers all of the essentials.

The most important aspects of this book are:
1. Very in depth and detailed COLOR pictures (RARE in tutorial books)
2. Tutorials are very relevant to the purpose of the book.
a. Example: You actually model a spider, statue, a human, a sword and texture them all!
3. Steps are taken to explain, then produce products. So you have a reason for the method demonstrated.
4. * ALL LESSONS WORK!!!!

In short, I highly recommend this book it has taught me a GREAT deal about the industry. There aren't many books that explain so SIMPLY yet cover so much.

Anyone interested in intermediate modeling and texturing should purchase this book.

It is for people who:
1. Have a general knowledge of 3d Studio Max
2. Want to develop thier intermediate modeling and texture skills further.

Warning: This book does not teach animation.

Please Todd Gantzler, produce another book on animation!!!!!

This is a great title by someone who really knows his stuff. Writing from actual games industry experience(something which most 3D/Design authors don't have) it's evident that he really knows his stuff, and the book clearly represents that.
The title not only looks at the creative, but also the technical aspects of creating game content that is usable, and easily implementable, with essential techniques that will give you a very strong skillset. Highly recommended.

I could not help feeling that Todd intended this book to be used in the classroom. It is organized very well for a semester in "Game Art". The reader has a chance to do some basic texturing and modeling. The emphasis is on 3d Max 6 and no animation is covered. Personally, I wished less modeling was covered and more visual art and texturing was covered instead. Also, more character texturing. There is a character that you model at the end of the book, but it is just a robot-type without a face and no texturing is involved. However, it is difficult to cover so many topics in one text. You will also find that some of the web links to tools he used for texturing are out of date and broken. If you have the latest Max tools, these tools may not be compatible anyway. In summary, a good text but more on texturing and character texturing would have made it an excellent choice.

Japanese beadwork or bead artistry is the art of making pictures or sculptures from small glass beads (seed beads) that have been threaded on to wire, which is then bent and twisted into shape. In this book, instructions are given as to how to make a variety of such sculptures, including story book characters (Little Red Riding Hood, Thumbelina, Peter Pan, Puss in Boots, etc), cars and planes, insects, kitchen items, sea creatures, dress-up dolls, doll house furniture, zoo animals, and assorted pieces of jewellery. The instructions are very simple to follow (in each case, a color illustration showing the layout of the beads is given) and color photographs of the different items are provided throughout.

"Glass Bead Artistry" is the first of three books on Japanese beadwork published by Ondori (the other two being Basic Beadwork for Beginners and The World of Beads) and is my favourite of the three. The projects in this book are the cutest of those in the three books and there is a nice mixture of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional projects. All three of these books, however, are excellent, and if this book appeals to you, I recommend that you buy all three.

Note that the items in these book are simple enough for children to make, but are so cute that adults would want to make them (I'm 27 and I'm a big fan of these books) too.

This great Ondori published book includes more patterns than you could possibly make in a month of Sundays. There are both "flat" designs and 3-D designs. Some favorites from this book are: the Thumbelina pages (13 patterns), the Bees, Bugs and Butterflies pages (7 patterns) and The Zoo Pages (13 patterns). In addition, there are 3 pages of patterns for simple neclaces, earrings, and hair decorations. The directions are well-written and easy to follow.

I bought this book because it is the best among the other bead art books. I actually discovered this book from the library and decided to borrow it and eventually purchased it online. Some designs are easy to do but those 3-d designs are quite complicated.Overall, i gave it 4 stars because i managed to create some really nice accessories for a first-timer like myself and the designs are more unique that normal bead art books. Recommended for those who are really into bead art and must be very patient cos it is time consuming!

Not content to make only jewelry from beads? Want to start your own bead zoo? Or sprinkle your garden with bead insects? Or plant your garden with bead vegetables and flowers? This book is chockablock full of cute little critters, zodiac signs, itty-bitty purses for your dollies, and space ships for a beaded trip to the stars.

Although the diagrams call for Toho seed beads, a Girl Scout troop project might try using big pony beads instead for a larger and less-painstaking result.

This book has a site where you can download the graphics that are in the book and work along. Great for learning things that would not otherwise be in a regular teach yourself book.

HOW TO WOW WITH ILLUSTRATOR by Ron Chan and Barbara Obermeier uses real-world projects and a step-by-step approach to teach the basics of producing polished Adobe Illustrator results. From the program's fundamentals and tips on creating and organizing files to using masks, blends and beyond to customize designs, HOW TO WOW WITH ILLUSTRATOR is an excellent and top pick for any collection serious about Illustrator basics.

I like this book, like all the others books in the serie "how to wow", because it is very useful and practically oriented.

Then, it's sometimes difficult to read because it lacks the sample files in "before" and "after" state, it lacks more step by step instructions and it lacks more screen copies of the layers palette.(for that, "the how to wow with Flash" book is perfect).
In this point of view, the chapter 3 (Mask and Blend) is hard to follow.

Then, because it's a good book, I give 4 stars, instead of 3...

If you're an illustrator (or a wanna be like me) then you'll appreciate the inside scoop on how the pros do it in Illustrator. Ron Chan is probably the most proficient illustrator I know of and he shares all of his time-tested methods of making the most of this very powerful tool. Put your tutorials down and pick up a copy of How to Wow with Illustrator today!

i write this as an experienced amateur book maker and keeper of a "creative" journal.

i think the author bit off more than she could chew. the book purports to tell you both how to keep a journal and how to make one of your own. the initial part about how to keep a journal is thin and insubstantial and focuses almost exclusively on writing [not a bad thing, but there are other ways to journal].

the two major sections of the book focus on basic book making and descriptions of collaborative projects between book artists and journal keepers. the book making instructions are incomplete and confusing, even for experience book makers. the diagrams are very confusing and poorly labled. the collaborative projects include some great books, but the idea that you can replicate these projects from the scant instructions provided is laughable. i wish there had been more photos of these books.

the text reads like an undergraduate term paper with too many exclamation points. the only redeeming features are the pictures of the collaborative projects. there are better books out there if you want to learn to keep or need inspiration for keeping a creative journal, or if you want to learn book making. this book does neither.

I've only been playing with book making for a little while....took one class at a rubber stamping show and really enjoyed it. I found this book shortly after that and having been using it, along with a few others to teach myself techniques. The pictures throughout the book are inspirational as well. The first chapters talk to things like the materials you'll use in book making (choosing papers, threads, tapes, adhesives) and how to actually do the book making (stitches, how the binding should look, etc). The nice thing here is that the author gives you leeway saying you could substitute this for that etc. Then the rest of the book is focused on creating specific types of journals/books: travel, introspection, confessions, dreams, poetry, grandmothers book, etc. Material lists are given as well as step by step instruction with both hand drawn pictures and photos of specific parts of the book like the binding. The only thing that I had a little trouble with was some of the terminology since it was new to me but as with other things, we pick that up as we learn. I think this is an excellent book for someone who has the basics under their belt or who has made a book to two before. For the beginner it's a book you can easily grow into, just need some patience. The results are well worth it.

...but what it isn't is a book about writing journals.

This is mainly about crafting journals -- that is, putting together paper and covers, stitching and gluing and the craftsy part of creating a physical book. It does give lip service to information on why keep a journal and the different kinds of journals people keep: external or internal journey, healing and insight, confessional, chronicle for future generations, catalyst for creative expression. Techniques like freewriting and list making are mentioned along with narrative description, dreams, and poetry but the emphasis here is on putting together pages and covers; how to make booklets from different kinds of papers, etc.

Illustrations are photographs of journals people have made and drawings showing various methods of folding, stitching, joining and binding. There are specific projects that include intricate instructions on how to make different journals: a travel, dream, yoga, poet's, grandmother's, painters, gardener's, bird lover's, etc. journals. The child's summer journal even has a spiral binding. The covers of the reunion journal are two gloves.

If you want to hand craft books this should show you how. Each would make a special gift which you could give with pages filled with your own writing or as a blank book.

This is a lovely and inspirational book for making interesting journals. I was pleased to see that the projects in this book were fresh--not the same old thing, revisited. The photographs and examples are so beautiful I found myself thinking, "I want to make this one and this one and this one..."

This is probably not the best book for beginning book makers. I would describe myself as an intermediate book maker with several years of experience in binding different types of books. In making the Gardener's Journal, I had some difficulty interpreting some of the illustrations and one of the templates is flat-out wrong; however, these problems did not prevent me from completing the Gardener's journal and the finished product is really beautiful.

Also, some of the bindings and materials suggested are tricky. For example, several journals include leather covers and the instructions seem to gloss over what type of leather to use, how to prepare it, etc. For the less commonly used book binding materials, such as embossed metallic foil and dollhouse nails, a list of suppliers would have been extremely helpful--even if I had to go online to access it.

On the plus side, this is a great book to get ideas on keeping different types of journals: bird watching journals, gardening journals, etc.

Another fresh idea this book provides is the viewpoint of both the journaler and the book maker. The journaler defines the purpose of the journal and the book maker creates a journal to meet that purpose. Very cool.

Adobe Photoshop CS: Complete Course by Jan Kabili is a well-written book by a very knowledgeable teacher. First, Kabili's extensive teaching experience comes across in her lucid writing. The exercises are detailed, well illustrated, and completely self-explanatory. She does not talk down to the reader, nor does she make assumptions about skill levels. The book is divided into 16 sessions, each of which could be a complete class. And therein lies the problem: by deciding to limit the course to 16 sessions, many topics are not covered in the book. Although not purporting to be a reference book, it does not cover such topics as taking images to print or working with other applications; even Illustrator and GoLive are barely touched upon. However, as a course for learning Photoshop basics, the book is excellent. We imagine many teachers will choose it for their students. The book is one of a series published by Wiley in conjunction with Seybold.
From a review in PC Graphics Report

I'm fairly new to the Photoshop world and this book has helped me on my way to becoming a pro. The lessons build up sequentially to help the reader understand how projects in Photoshop can be completed. Each chapter is a new lesson that builds on the previous lesson to aid in comprehending the way different methods can be utilized to enhance other features in CS. The whole book is a large project that the reader should be able to complete by the end on their own. I highly recommend this book as a beginner introduction into the powerful application that is photoshop.

If you are serious about photoshop capability on color management, filters, layers, everything, look somewhere else!!! I bought this book together with Photoshop CS One-on-one from Deke McClelland, I spend 95% of time with Deke, better approach, better illustration. If you have spare money, buy it to fill up your shelf. Otherwise, save your money for a beer.

The book is laid out in seven main sections and then broken down into subsections within those sections, there are two bonus sections in the back of the book. A great tutorial CD is also included in the back of the book. You get an overview of what you can do with Photoshop and how to configure Photoshop for your particular working style in the beginning section. Then each section goes through a somewhat logical progression into the many tools and techniques that you start adding to your arsenal of knowledge.

They advise that you load the tutorial onto your system instead of working from the CD. Of course the CD works on both MAC and PC environments. Every session in the book is setup in a step by step format. The bold type indicates the steps you should do, the non-bold type gives more of an explanation of that step. The steps are illustrated with a hot pink number and those numbers correspond to the illustration. Also offered in hot pink are caution, notes and tips.

As many Photoshop users know there is usually more than one way to do something in Photoshop. In some of the sessions you can find which step works best with the way you work. I got a nice refresher course on some of the tools and learned some new and faster ways to get some of my work done.

I would have liked some more info on some of the other programs in CS but this was a Photoshop CS book and not a Creative Suites book. This book is not a reference book either while it gives some really good info for those that are new to the Photoshop world it does not offer much for the more advanced users of Photoshop. This would definitely be a good book for beginning graphics classes. This book whets your appetite for more in-depth features that Photoshop has to offer.