The original Big Book of Design Ideas has become one of the bestselling graphics books of all time. As one example, the book made amazon.com's Top 1000 books and stayed there for a good while. (That territory is usually reserved for novels, cookbooks, diet books, biographies, and other "general audience" books. Few books with a narrow audience reach those type of sales numbers.)

So, when my publisher asked for a Big Book of New Design Ideas, he said, "Do a book just like the first one, only make it even.