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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
Overall, this book was pretty good. The accessible writing made it easy to focus on the content. While a lot of it was common sense, there were a few tidbits of information worth noting. If you don't have a design bone in your body, this book will help a lot. If you know a thing or two, it's a great refresher.
Pretty good and clear exposition of simple but powerful principles of design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity, illustrated with good before-and-after examples. The second half of the book also discusses colour theory and font choice, with reference to the CRAP principles. I felt I came away with a better eye for what's bad and an idea for how to fix it.
A great little volume that all non-designers who use computers should own. Simple, straightforward, and useful. This thin book taught me more than other much larger volumes on design.
Great book if you're not a designer, but want to learn how to view the world like an amateur designer. Even though I've worked with many designers, I learned a ton from this book.
This easy-to-read book has a ton of great background information and examples for those not-so-graphically inclined. In wonderful picture examples, Williams describes all the basics someone who hasn't done design before would need to know. The book even has short quizzes and review sessions at the ends of chapters. I would say this is a great beginner's book for design.
I read this for an online class on technical documentation. This book is well organized and to the point, with lots of practical takeaways and illustrative before/after examples. HOWEVER, it’s definitely for *beginners*, and if you’ve ever used InDesign in your life, you’ll be bored out of your mind. I did enjoy the little history snippets about typography design though. Pretty graphics heavy, as you can imagine, so a quick read. Wish I’d had it as a resource 10 years ago.
Also wish I could show this to a former colleague to prove once and for all that single spaces between sentences is the standard these days and that all-caps text is hard to read in bulk. 🙄
Also wish I could show this to a former colleague to prove once and for all that single spaces between sentences is the standard these days and that all-caps text is hard to read in bulk. 🙄
I found this book very helpful and learned so much I didn't know about graphic design that now just seems obvious and like common sense. I would recommend this for everyone who is ever going to write a paper, make a business card or a flyer, or really anything to do with small graphic design tasks.
This was a very quick read that basically confirmed that common sense applies to visual design: organize your information, line stuff up, repeat some elements and make others different. It's nice to have a framework for this "common sense" stuff, though, and it has helped me think more clearly about why something works or doesn't work.
I really like that it looks super dated. All her finished designs look kind of goofy but I think it actually reinforces the focus on underlying principles - you can tell that if the font faces and art styles were swapped around things would look just fine in a modern setting.
I really like that it looks super dated. All her finished designs look kind of goofy but I think it actually reinforces the focus on underlying principles - you can tell that if the font faces and art styles were swapped around things would look just fine in a modern setting.
Rules to follow (or break!) in design and typography, explained especially for beginners or those who occasional do design work but aren't really professional designers (e.g. me).
There wasn't really anything here that was a revelation for me, but the way the book is organized is so simple that it actually got me thinking about and reminding myself of the "rules" as I've been designing things, mostly for work. In that way, the book is really well-done; everything is memorable and applicable. Definitely a worthwhile reference for those of us who are self-taught and infrequent designers. this clear and simple framework for thinking about design and typography elements goes a long way.
There wasn't really anything here that was a revelation for me, but the way the book is organized is so simple that it actually got me thinking about and reminding myself of the "rules" as I've been designing things, mostly for work. In that way, the book is really well-done; everything is memorable and applicable. Definitely a worthwhile reference for those of us who are self-taught and infrequent designers. this clear and simple framework for thinking about design and typography elements goes a long way.
Very useful book. It's mostly concerned with design of things with words on them: books, newsletters, logos, webpages, etc. (which is mostly what I'm interested in). It works really well as a primer, presenting basic concepts of good design clearly and memorably, and innummerable examples illustrate. It's also entertainingly written.
Nicely excoriating of things like weak contrasts, five-space indents, 12-point font sizes, overreliance on centered alignments, common typographic errors, mistrust of whitespace. A lot of the examples contain interesting quotations (Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, good poems, etc.), which I appreciated.
And it taught me so many things I never knew, or knew to think about! Hanging punctuation to make a clean alignment. That numbers can be uppercase or lowercase. Same, effectively, with hyphens and parentheses. When and how to use an en-dash. What prime marks are. Different categories of typefaces. Subtle differences in font weights that contribute to readability.
As I neared the end I began to see a lot of things that I disagreed with the author about, stylistically. She hates Helvetica, for instance, and likes grunge-y typefaces. She seems to give the reader a little less respect than I think they deserve, emphasizing the need to include elements that "draw the reader in to the page", whereas I question the need to try to compel readers to read something they might not be interested in. Those little things might keep the book out of five-star territory, for me, but it was still one of the most useful books on design that I've read yet.
Nicely excoriating of things like weak contrasts, five-space indents, 12-point font sizes, overreliance on centered alignments, common typographic errors, mistrust of whitespace. A lot of the examples contain interesting quotations (Shakespeare, Mary Sidney, good poems, etc.), which I appreciated.
And it taught me so many things I never knew, or knew to think about! Hanging punctuation to make a clean alignment. That numbers can be uppercase or lowercase. Same, effectively, with hyphens and parentheses. When and how to use an en-dash. What prime marks are. Different categories of typefaces. Subtle differences in font weights that contribute to readability.
As I neared the end I began to see a lot of things that I disagreed with the author about, stylistically. She hates Helvetica, for instance, and likes grunge-y typefaces. She seems to give the reader a little less respect than I think they deserve, emphasizing the need to include elements that "draw the reader in to the page", whereas I question the need to try to compel readers to read something they might not be interested in. Those little things might keep the book out of five-star territory, for me, but it was still one of the most useful books on design that I've read yet.