Fliesendekor aus Portugal /Tile Designs from Portugal + CD Rom [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This 207-page book is 6 1/8 inches square, a case bound hardback with laminated covers and no dust cover. Photos and designs are nicely printed in color on heavy paper. A CD with tile design and pattern images is affixed inside the back cover in a plastic envelope. Pepin Press has produced a series of tile design books in this format.

This volume contains designs created from tiles found in Lisbon, Portugal, where tiles are commonly used to cover exterior walls of buildings. The first 82 pages contain photos of tile installations from which the designs were created, a paean to Lisbon by the author, and a primer on architectural tile use in Lisbon by the director of the National Tile Museum. The two essays are presented in eight languages.

The remaining 125 pages contain:
> 100 individual tile designs,
> 100 patterns in a 4x4 arrangement of a single tile design,
> 100 thumbnail photos of the actual tile installations from which the designs were created, including the street address where each can be found.

Information about where to find the actual tiles is unique to this volume among the five volumes in this series I have seen - this one plus "Art Nouveau," "Barcelona," "Havana," and "Puerto Rico." Also unique is that, although the photos show many of the actual tile installations with boarders, there are no border designs included in the collection. Unlike the other volumes in the series, the 4x4 patterns in this collection do not include grout lines between tiles. A fun "Where's Waldo?" game matching the tile design to the photos is challenging as the tile designs aren't always what one might expect, and there are differences in color.

The CD contains JPG images in two sizes of each of the 100 tile designs and of the 100 4x4 patterns.
> Tiles - 300ppi, 1205x1205 pixels, CMYK
> Tiles - 72ppi, 289x289 pixels, RGB
> Patterns - 300ppi, 1205x1205 pixels, CMYK
> Patterns - 72ppi, 289x289 pixels, RGB
The endpapers were created from one of the patterns in different colors, and images for these are included in both sizes.

Compared to the other collections in the series I have seen, this one is deficient in the number of designs, the complexity of the patterns (all are single-tile designs), and the lack of borders. Relative to the other collections, the pixel size of the large pattern images is much smaller; however the large tile images are much bigger. This is the only collection that includes the designs in both the CMYK and RGB color spaces. Because of the relative deficiencies, this collection is less flexible than the others and rates fewer stars.

The Pepin Press image rights declaration includes the following, "For non-professional applications, single images can be used free of charge. The images cannot be used for any type of commercial or otherwise professional application - including all types of printed or digital publications - without prior permission...." Also noted is that "...larger and/or vectorized files are available for most images and can be ordered...." For a commercial graphic artist requiring large, high fidelity images, Pepin Press volumes are essentially catalogs.

The CD envelopes in many Pepin Press books exude an oily substance onto the CD. In one case in my experience it made the disc unreadable; subsequently I have routinely cleaned the CD's before attempting to read. The substance can be removed, but not easily. Care must be taken to not damage the disc.

Wonderful source for tile design. the CD makes it so easy to use. Will definitely get more books from this series.