Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills

I've been around for awhile, and have stacks of books claiming to spark design skills and creative thinking. Most end up in the back corner of the shelf, never living up to their promise. I'm impressed, and happy to say this book is a different breed.

1) It's a beautiful book. There is design love and care on every page.
2) It's designed for reading and use. It's not a coffee-table book or pretty play thing.
3) There's a free teacher's guide, [...] to help instructors and managers use the book.
4) The inspirations aren't just in the book's design (a common failing in design books), but the stories, and challenging exercises even experienced designers can benefit from. It's an easy book to use for team challenges, offsites and to teach old dogs some new things.
5) It includes exercises from a wide range of kinds of design, which is fun and challenging. Some are print based, others are interactive, or involve urban wayfinding, advertising, web apps, dishware, clothing, you name it. It fulfills the idea of forcing you to stretch your creative muscles.

Highly recommended for people who want to learn by making, and who have some design experience but want to grow and stretch their creative abilities.

This book its simply amazing! It is well written and the instructions are clear for every workshop. It gives you examples to compare what you have done and to improve. It also let you choose what tools or materials to use for your designs, in my case I used Illustrator and Photoshop but the instructions are so simple you can even use paper and crayons!! And above all this, the challenges are actually fun to do! :D

I'm a graphic design student and I recently gave this as a gift to a friend of mine who is graduating. She almost didn't get it because I wanted to keep it for myself! Very cool book, lots of fun ways to get your creative juices flowing. I'd highly recommend it for other graphic designers.

I have found this book to be an inspiration both in terms of idea generation and design output. This book would be invaluable to a studio wishing to experiment with design ideas to showcase their clients. I intend to work through these challenges and am confident my design and thought process will improve beacuse of it!