New Releases by Bruno Munari

First published in Italy in 1956, Bruno Munari''s In the Darkness of the Night tells the tale of an interconnected, intimate yet expansive journey across three settings—in the darkness, through a meadow, and into a mysterious cave—through a spellbinding combination of paper stocks, transparencies, cutouts, and simple but lively characters. This timeless artist''s book, available in a new English edition, is a must-have for Munari fans, designers, bibliophiles, and lovers of exceptional book design.

In the early 1960s Italian design legend Bruno Munari published his visual case studies on shapes: Circle, Square, and, a decade later, Triangle. Using examples from ancient Greece and Egypt, as well as works by Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, Munari invests the three shapes with specific qualities: the circle relates to the divine, the square signifies safety and enclosure, and the triangle provides a key connective form for designers. One of the great designers of the twentieth century, Munari contributed to the fields of painting, sculpture, design, and photography while teaching throughout his seventy-year career. After World War II he began to focus on book design, creating children's books known for their simplicity and playfulness.

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

"It is utterly forbidden to move the original during exposure because if you do the reproduction won''t be exact. This is where the experimenter wonders: and what happens if I move this original on the plate of glass?"--BOOK JACKET.

In this imaginative ABC, acclaimed artist, designer and children's author, Bruno Munari shows how fun letters can be. From an Ant on an Apple to a Blue Butterfly to a Cat in a Cage, Munari pairs words in whimsical ways until Fly frees itself from its page, lands on the Hat, buzzes near the Ice Cream and provides the final sound for Zzzzz.

Text and photographs introduce a variety of stones and suggest pictures to paint on them.

Bruno Munari investigates the design elements of the square and its use in designs as diverse as churches, monuments, games and fonts. He investigates the meaning of the square as the idea of enclosure, home and settlement as well as the interesting permutations that can be achieved from the monotonous repetition of four sides.

In this small but extraordinary encyclopedia, Bruno Munari selects and describes the many uses of the circle in art, design and architecture. A fascinating and mysterious form, the circle stands for perfection, cyclicity and the divine, but also instability and movement.

This quirky handbook of Italian gestures, first published in 1958 by renowned Milanese artist and graphic designer Bruno Munari, will help the phalange-phobic decipher the unspoken language of gestures--a language not found in any dictionary. Photos.

A playful and vibrant guide to drawing the sun In Drawing the Sun, Bruno Munari suggests: "When drawing the sun, try to have on hand colored paper, chalk, felt-tip markers, crayons, pencils, ballpoint pens--you can draw a sun with any one of them. Also remember that sunset and dawn are the back and front of the same phenomenon: when we are looking at the sunset, the people over there are looking at the dawn."

For Drawing a Tree, Bruno Munari proposes: "When drawing a tree, always remember that every branch is more slender than the one that came before. Also note that the trunk splits into two branches, then those branches split in two, then those in two, and so on, and so on, until you have a full tree, be it straight, squiggly, curved up, curved down, or bent sideways by the wind."

Artwork by Bruno Munari.

This children's book was written and drawn by Munari in 1958. It tells the story of a frog named Romilda whose love of jumping from one thing to another leads her into a series of unlikely and entertaining adventures ...

The journey of a birthday gift and the different means of transport it must use to reach its destination. But what's inside? Again, a tale that winds through pages of different sizes.

Bruno Munari (1907-98) was an artist & graphic designer who transformed childlike impulses into effective design. 490 illustrations