Industrial Arts Design
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Students and teachers in design history and craft art history
- Primary and secondary school art or technical education workers supplementing design theory
- Readers interested in the relationship between object form, decoration, and function
- Editors needing public-domain design education materials for research or translation
Not a good fit for
- Readers hoping for modern software operations or specific making steps
- Those who only want to see many color image examples and do not want to read discursive text
- Professional engineers needing contemporary industrial standards and material parameters
Reading tips
- First read the table of contents and introduction to map the author's basic framework for discussing design issues.
- After each chapter, choose an object nearby and use the book's concepts to write a one-page analysis note.
- Compare the book's principles with contemporary design cases, recording which still apply and which need updating.
- If used for teaching, excerpt chapters and pair them with local materials, designing discussion questions rather than lecturing directly from the book.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
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- 8
- 9
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FAQ
How is this book different from ordinary craft-making books?
Is the content still useful for design study today?
Can someone without a design background read it?
Comments
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About the author
William Harrison Varnum (1878–1946) was an American architect and educator. Public information about his life is limited; what can be confirmed is that he long engaged in teaching and writing on architecture and design, and that he left behind a textbook, Industrial Arts Design. Judging from the subject matter of this work, his writing was aimed at introductory design and craft education, with attention to explaining the form, ornament, and practical function of industrial products together. His style is plain and well organized, suitable for classroom teaching and self-study. The book exercised a certain influence in American industrial arts and manual training education in the early twentieth century and was often used as a reference in school design courses. On the whole, Varnum was a design writer oriented toward teaching practice, and his contribution lies chiefly in textbook writing and the popularization of design education.
