I love this book. Every time I open it I find something different, something I didn't see before. Highly recommended to anyone circling the doldrums of design.

Both my daughter (a regional marketing analyst) and I (a high school graphics design teacher) share several graphic design texts, and we are very satisfied this text as reference.

I have had the book creative sparks on my shelf for about a year now, I thought it would come in handy when I hit a creative lull. When I bought the book it was on one of my book sprees. I bought 8 or 9 design books ( $300.00). I opened this book and saw 2 or 3 exercises like making a mask another was using a desktop scanner to scan interesting objects. Now in glancing at the book I thought there would be a lot of exercises like this. The book is 310 pages filled with the obvious.

Examples of Content:
So what do you do if your layout hits a rough spot? " Try changing the font size on the header".
I have been working on a project for hours and I am getting no results, what do I do? "Get up and take a walk around the block".

The nuggets of wisdom that take two pages for instance; "A layout or piece of art is finished when nothing can be added to boost the message and nothing that takes away from the message remains". This nugget is paired with the recipe for the "Perfect Martini".

By the numbers:
310 pages
18 artistic assignments / projects
24 Life practices or motherly advice for a healthy designer
268 pages of designer common sense.

By the Design:
The book is a great example of good layout and a cool style for every page. The book may be nice to have as an example layout design.

Content:
Nothing groundbreaking! In fact this stuff should be obvious habits for professionals. If Designers are not already doing this they are not designers. I Really felt this book was low level "well duh" type stuff. I do not think it is irrelevant but it is a book that I would give this book to a Design Student. This book is a good foundation. But for anyone in the industry it is pretty elementary.
[...]

I'm a creativity researcher, so I've read just about every book there is on how to be more creative. This is the first one that actually LOOKS creative. You can't read it from front to back. Instead, the pages are all cross-indexed (each page lists four other "relevant pages") and grouped into six themes, such as "On the job" and "Designer's notebook" (each of the six themes has its own color code, and the pages that relate to that theme are tagged with that color). The pages have more visual images than text, and it's a great looking book.

Now, would this book make you more creative? I'm not so sure about that. The advice in it, as another reviewer has already pointed out, is largely common sense, stuff you know already. Most of what's in the book is aligned with the findings of creativity researchers, so you won't be getting bad advice (see Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration). So I doubt you will be surprised by anything you READ in here; but the visuals will surprise you, they are the strength of this book.

I was impressed enough with "design basics index" by this author to buy this one. This book however was kind of a joke. Sorry. The ideas in here
are nothing you wouldn't have thought of (unless you never think).
It is a small book, so the pages don't have much room on them (for the type size) to write much anyway, even if the ideas were worth having.
I was forced to give it one star.....because this review form won't allow me to give it less.