The Non-Designer's Design and Type Books, Deluxe Edition |  | Author: Robin Williams
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Category: Book
List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $23.49
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 31449
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1 Deluxe
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0321534050
Dewey Decimal Number: 686
EAN: 9780321534057
ASIN: 0321534050
Publication Date: October 25, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Design and typographic insights from the author of The Non-Designer’s book series (over 700,000 copies in print!)
This book offers decades of experience from one of the greatest computer book authors. Here in one volume, Robin Williams has joined together a new edition of her classic The Non-Designer’s Design Book—in glorious full color for the first time—and her best-selling The Non-Designer’s Type Book. Robin uses her straightforward and lighthearted style to define the principles that govern good design and type as well as the logic behind those principles. Using numerous examples, you’ll learn what looks best and why on your way to designing beautiful and effective projects. Whether you are a Mac user or a Windows user, a type novice or an experienced graphic designer, you will find inspiration and direction for the design quandaries and conundrums you are sure to encounter!
These essential guides to design and type will teach you about:
- The four principles of design that underlie every design project
- Categories of type
- Working with color
- How to combine typefaces for maximum effect
- Readability and legibility
- The proper typographic treatment of punctuation
- Letter spacing, line spacing, and paragraph spacing
- Special characters and accent marks
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 Must have for everybody in business or research January 14, 2010
Edward J. Omagbemi (Sunshine Coast, QLD Australia)
This book is actually two books in one.
The first book (Non-Designer's design book) opens your eyes for good design. I just read it once while watching TV and the next day intuitively started applying what I had browsed. It affects the way you structure Emails, Word documents, ... Basically everything.
I was not happy with our website and all off the sudden could actually put in words what I didn't like about it. I could write a design guideline and ask web designers for quotes. I even started re-designing our companies trade show booth with over double the impact (enquiries, sales,...) as result.
If you are a small business owner or have to deal with anything design this is a great starting point.
I included research in my headline because I worked in research for a long time and know how crucial the reports, presentations and publications are for the career. I wish I would have had this book at that time.
The second book (type) got a bit dry and detailed for me but opened my eyes for effects of fonts. Needless to say that I changed my standard fonts in Word straight away.
Cheers,
Edward
 Ideal for people drafted into Design work with no experience December 26, 2009
D. Greenbaum (Lawrence, KS)
The Non-Designer's Design and Type Book, Deluxe Edition (Paperback)
Robin Williams is the queen of Macintosh design and her new book is it's Bible. The book is exactly as described: a design book for those people not trained as designers. The book is actually divided into two sections, design and typography.
The design book goes over the basic principles of how to design using a few basic concepts most anyone can learn such as white space, proximity, layout, and contrast. She gives copious amounts of real world examples to help lay people give a bit of "oomph" to such things as newsletters, business cards, and stationary. For someone trying to go out on their own, this book is an invaluable aid in basic design work while saving money to get a true expert on board. The book is a very quick read, but it's a good book to keep around whenever you do design work.
The typography portion was a bit over my head. It's all about fonts, typefaces and so forth. She clearly tries to made the topic accessible, but I found the content difficult to understand as someone not in the design field. The typography portion of the book can be used as a reference guide when deciding which font would work in specific situations.
This book is perfect for the small business owner or the group secretary who suddenly gets called on to create a newsletter or a basic identity for print.
Pros: Accessible and understandable principles of basic design made understandable to everyone
Cons: Font portions a bit over the novice's head
Four out of Five Dogcows
Very Useful September 23, 2009
B. Haynes (Portland, OR USA)
I actually bought this book before for school & for some reason decided to sell it after the course was done. Now I have bought it again because I decided that I wanted this book in my collection. There are lots of examples and quality images in the book so you can see what the writer is talking about. It gives you great font ideas & advice on how to create effective flyers, invitations, layouts, etc. Now I use it as a reference guide whenever I am creating something that needs to stand out or look special.
Great Book! June 28, 2009
J. Galeano (Colombia)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you don't know nothing o know a little about design, but, the most important, you care about how your work should be presented, this is a great guide to learn the basics and the rules for design.
An excellent starer book about design November 21, 2008
Joshua Cunningham
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I wanted to write a quick blurb about this little book that has gone a long way towards teaching me proper design.
I've been dabbling seriously in graphic design for about a year now and find it one of the most frustrating things I've ever done and also one of the most satisfying. It's very subjective, hard to describe, very time consuming, very sensitive, and totally maddening. When it works, it really works but when it doesn't work, it shows you the highest level of frustration possible.
Robin explains all the basics very well which puts you in a position to begin to experiment. If you just stick yourself in front of Photoshop and try to bang out a business card or a menu or a technical document (which you really wouldn't do in Photoshop), it's probably not going to work out well unless you've had some experience. If, however, you read this little guide and try it, you're going to have a few more ideas and at least understand the constraint you're working with in terms of color, alignment, etc.
This book is great for people without any experience in design who want to improve the way their documents, webpages, application screens, and printed material looks. You're not going to win any contests with this knowledge (and neither are her examples) but what you produce will immediately look better. The writing style is a bit goofy but I use what I learned every day in everything I produce from graffiti to webpages to technical documents to resumes.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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