{"id":491,"date":"2011-02-08T12:45:50","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T23:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/?p=491"},"modified":"2011-02-08T17:24:25","modified_gmt":"2011-02-08T04:24:25","slug":"the-non-designers-design-and-type-books-robin-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2011\/02\/08\/the-non-designers-design-and-type-books-robin-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"The Non-Designer’s Design & Type Books — Robin Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>\"\"This is a decent overview of graphic design and layout. Everybody who has to design a poster, web page or invitation should read it. And that’s no chore, because it’s an easy and fun read.<\/p>\n

This book is an updated compilation of two of Williams’s previous books: The Non-Designer’s Design Book<\/em> and, unsurprisingly, The Non-Designer’s Type Book<\/em>. The first half is about design. Williams presents four fundamental layout concepts: Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, Contrast. (I list them in this order because PARC is a better acronym than the reverse.) Most of the rest of this part consists of elaborations and applications of these basics.<\/p>\n

The colour section describes shades and tints and talks about warm and cool colours. She also describes the colour wheel. It’s a good intro to a topic that has already filled hundreds of other books.<\/p>\n

The layout section in the book mostly refers to print layouts. It contains lots of useful information on page-based layouts, including business stationery, posters and flyers. A lot of this translates well to digital media. There is a section devoted to website layout, but it’s a bit dated.<\/p>\n

The section on typography is good. When it comes to fonts, don’t go for concord (too boring) or conflict (too jarring). Instead, strive for contrast<\/strong> to achieve balanced composition. This applies to all layout really, not just type.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot more about type in the second half of the book. There’s some useful history and terminology, including a nice distinction between legibility (recognising letterforms) and readability (reading and understanding text). And there’s a lot of specific advice about using specific characters correctly, such as punctuation and spacing. The discussion of the subtleties of letterspacing is quite illuminating.<\/p>\n

It makes me sad that one of my favourite typefaces, Helvetica, cops a bit of flak. I have often seen it derided as being dated and “oh so ’70s”. This seems unfair — looking at it now, it just doesn’t strike me as being especially retro. I guess I’m just too young to remember its (over-) use from all those years ago.<\/p>\n

Throughout this section of the book, Williams advises us to boldly use contrasting sizes, faces and spacing: in short, Don’t Be A Wimp<\/strong>. This is typical of the good, punchy, memorable advice in this fine book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a decent overview of graphic design and layout. Everybody who has to design a poster, web page or invitation should read it. And that’s no chore, because it’s an easy and fun read. This book is an updated compilation of two of Williams’s previous books: The Non-Designer’s Design Book and, unsurprisingly, The Non-Designer’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,28,55,84],"class_list":["post-491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-books","tag-design","tag-typography","tag-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":499,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491\/revisions\/499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}