graphic design

I have been a graphic designer for over 20 years. I teach typography at the university level. I learned typography the old-fashioned way: by specifying, setting, and manipulating it by hand. From that background I can confidently state that THE best way to truly understand how type works is through understanding the forms of letters, words, and groups of words.

Students trying to understand typography today have a huge disincentive to slow down and truly study how type works and that is, the speed of the computer. It's easy to go right past the fundamentally subtle nature of letterforms and combinations thereof. You can't understand type at the pace that you can pull down a menu and select a typeface while rushing to get to the more exciting steps of design.

This book is one of the very best for SHOWING what type is really about. Comments about the layout of the book and the size of artwork in it should not dissuade students and instructors; this book will show you what type IS and how it works in design.

This is one of the rare books that my art college actually required me to purchase for a Typography class. The design of this book is poor and very dated. Just take a look at the cover. The first chapter offers a timeline which is interesting in concept--it features a brief history of lettering and type, and adds images of other significant events happening at the same time. But the timeline design forces you to jump back and forth from images to text and the grid layout forces the image placement to be so inconsistent that you give up trying to find the corresponding text. The rest of the book provides interesting and useful information for the type neophyte, but again, its WAY too dated to be a required textbook. I'm sorry I bought this book.

Very well organized, structured, etc, etc.... but, can you believe the illustrations of posters and printed examples in this book have NO INFORMATION ABOUT THE ACTUAL SIZE of them????? What happened??? Were all designers doing postcards and stamps before our time??? Shame on the authors, shame on the publishers.