Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design

by Paul Mijksenaar

Open The Art of Instructional Design displays an entertaining array of the most ingenious, stupid, beautiful, and horrible visual solutions that instruction designers and illustrators have invented to help us handle modern technology and everyday products.These works of art show us how to floss out teeth properly, where to insert the printer cartridge, which button to press to transfer a phone call, how to use chopsticks, how to open a milk carton, and how to exit the plane in case of an emergency landing. Open Here also includes a diverse sampling of the finest cut-away drawing of a truck's diesel engine, a revealing expanded view of a model airplane, and detailed full-color photographs of a sewing machine in a 19th-century manual.Open Here also includes an overview of the basic elements of visual the baffling yet remarkable drawings, cartoons and symbols that tell us where to cut, where to twist, how to repeat, and also how not to do all of the above.

Genres: Design, Art, Art Design, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[M0rningstar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the topic, but the book does not do it justice. The examples showcased are beautiful and interesting but little context, history or in-depth analysis is given. This is not so much a book about instructional design, as a catalogue of cool-looking instructional graphics. Great fun to browse through and wonderful to look at, but not a very informative text per se.

[Shorttailedopossum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goed voor m’n humeur, hilarisch, maar stipt soms wel interessante dingen aan. Fijne waardering voor alledaagse kunst en alledaagse problemen.

[Jos Deroo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funky book on Visual instructions (how to and how not to).

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book, although its age shows a little bit. While you might think that instructional art is a limited field, the book is actually far shorter than it ought to be, and ends with a tantalizing page called "What we left out."

I've always loved commercial and industrial art, so I may be a bit biased here, but almost every page features a print I'd love to have framed and hanging on my wall.

I especially appreciated the kitchen-gadget "quiz" which revealed how mysterious many man-made objects can be, no matter how educated or experienced you may be.

[Bill Jelen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Open Here contains a collection of illustrated opening instructions from around the world. Think about how you would communicate a task such as threading a sewing machine using illustration. This book has a retrospective of illustrations from the last 100 years and is a great book for generating ideas about how to communicate.

[Cecilia · Rating 3 out of 5]

kind of disappointing for a book on graphic language. the design should've been better.

[Ralph Zoontjens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice examples of well-crafted instruction graphics.