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oldpondnewfrog 's review for:
The Non-Designer's Design & Type Books, Deluxe Edition
by Robin P. Williams
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.