“Artists and designers all share a common curse—it is the curse of being intensely interested in the world around themselves. They consummate this interest by one of two means: 1) capturing what they see in a sketch or photograph, or 2) if it’s small enough, they put whatever they might be fascinated with into their pocket. Fortunately for the places that he visited, Rob held his kleptomaniac back and stuck to capturing his eyes’ delight as digital photographs. Each set of photographs has been categorized into visual themes a la the #hashtag generation, but in old-fashioned book form and with the kind of curious but authoritative prose that quietly reveals the Paul Rand in Rob. In this book, you get to see how a designer thinks by using his or her surroundings as their active canvas of thought—finding patterns and finding new relations with the single goal of crafting a unique understanding of the world.” —John Maeda, Ph.D., Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Design Partner
