The Non-Designer's Design Book
I keep starting to write book reviews, then running out of steam and abandoning them half-way through. I don't know why I find book reviews so hard to write. Anyway, apologies if this one sucks: I'm deliberately lowering my prose standards so I can finish the damn thing.
I recently read a book called "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams (no, not that Robin Williams). It pretty much does what it says on the tin: gives the newbie just enough of a clue about visual design of documents to be getting on with. We're all (hopefully!) clued up enough to avoid obvious solecisms like putting everything in 20pt Comic Sans; this book attempts to take things to the next stage, where you can start to make your documents look actively good in simple though effective ways. She focuses on printed documents, but occasionally addresses the Web - but her example print documents generally work better than her example websites, IMHO.
Williams' message might be boiled down to "make similar things look identical, and different things look very different". More formally, she sets out four principles to adhere to when designing your documents:
There's a meta-rule, though: don't be afraid to break any or all of these rules, provided that you know what you're doing and what effect you hope to achieve; and when you break a rule, do it boldly and don't be a wimp, or it will just look like you've made a mistake. Once you've set up a standard alignment, bringing something firmly out of that alignment emphasises it; bringing something slightly out of alignment just looks like your mouse hand slipped. She also repeatedly advises you to have a strong central focus around which your design is based.
The first (and best) part of the book introduces these rules, and goes through several example documents (menus, flyers, business cards, CVs, magazine pages), starting with bad designs and then iteratively applying the four principles to produce something that's much better - though occasionally I think she should have stopped a couple of iterations earlier than she did. Subsequent parts deal with colour selection using colour wheels, and choice of fonts. Here she expands on her earlier advice about choosing contrasting fonts, and tells you how to do this in more detail, introducing various axes along which typefaces can be classified (weight, direction, colour, sans versus serif, modern versus oldstyle versus slab serif, width, and so on - it looks like the blog I Love Typography covers all this stuff well). She advises against ever using Times New Roman or Arial/Helvetica, as they're simply overused.
The book's fun to read, and (as one would hope) fun to just look at, if only for the 300-odd fonts she uses in her examples. wormwood_pearl and I have also had fun dissecting and critiquing lots of documents since reading it. Hopefully I'll be less clueless next time I have to produce an appealing-looking document, though I don't think I'll be setting myself up as a web designer any time soon.
I recently read a book called "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams (no, not that Robin Williams). It pretty much does what it says on the tin: gives the newbie just enough of a clue about visual design of documents to be getting on with. We're all (hopefully!) clued up enough to avoid obvious solecisms like putting everything in 20pt Comic Sans; this book attempts to take things to the next stage, where you can start to make your documents look actively good in simple though effective ways. She focuses on printed documents, but occasionally addresses the Web - but her example print documents generally work better than her example websites, IMHO.
Williams' message might be boiled down to "make similar things look identical, and different things look very different". More formally, she sets out four principles to adhere to when designing your documents:
- Contrast: make different things look very different. Don't have 12-point headings and 10-point text: have 20-point headings and 7-point text, in contrasting fonts.
- Repetition: make similar things (dishes on a menu, for instance) look the same, and introduce repeated visual elements (unusual bullets, images, rules, etc).
- Alignment: pick one alignment and stick to it. The more things you can get to line up vertically or horizontally, the better. Things that are conceptually the same (such as menu items) should definitely line up. Left- and right-alignment creates clear visual edges, and so should be preferred to centred alignment, which (she claims) has a staid, formal look. Don't "trap" whitespace between a sharp edge and a ragged edge.
- Proximity: group logically related things together on the page. Conversely, use whitespace to separate things that are not logically related. Important special case: a subheading should be closer to the paragraph it's heading than to the previous paragraph.
There's a meta-rule, though: don't be afraid to break any or all of these rules, provided that you know what you're doing and what effect you hope to achieve; and when you break a rule, do it boldly and don't be a wimp, or it will just look like you've made a mistake. Once you've set up a standard alignment, bringing something firmly out of that alignment emphasises it; bringing something slightly out of alignment just looks like your mouse hand slipped. She also repeatedly advises you to have a strong central focus around which your design is based.
The first (and best) part of the book introduces these rules, and goes through several example documents (menus, flyers, business cards, CVs, magazine pages), starting with bad designs and then iteratively applying the four principles to produce something that's much better - though occasionally I think she should have stopped a couple of iterations earlier than she did. Subsequent parts deal with colour selection using colour wheels, and choice of fonts. Here she expands on her earlier advice about choosing contrasting fonts, and tells you how to do this in more detail, introducing various axes along which typefaces can be classified (weight, direction, colour, sans versus serif, modern versus oldstyle versus slab serif, width, and so on - it looks like the blog I Love Typography covers all this stuff well). She advises against ever using Times New Roman or Arial/Helvetica, as they're simply overused.
The book's fun to read, and (as one would hope) fun to just look at, if only for the 300-odd fonts she uses in her examples. wormwood_pearl and I have also had fun dissecting and critiquing lots of documents since reading it. Hopefully I'll be less clueless next time I have to produce an appealing-looking document, though I don't think I'll be setting myself up as a web designer any time soon.