Designing with Typo

...graphy, that is.

It's been a while since I read a book that's worth mentioning, but here I am again, this time with The Non-Designer's Design Book.

It's rare that you read a book that would be useful to just about anyone. And when I say just about anyone, I really mean that. Not only programmers, or people interested in computers, but potentially also home moms, school children and practically anyone who might at some point of their life do anything that has something to gain from looking look and would involve some text.

The emphasis, however, is "text". I was a bit mislead with the title of the book, and understood that the book taught about design in the general sense. But, as the subtitle states ("Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice"), it's very typography-centered – how to lay out text and how to choose your fonts. Just wanted to get that out from the start.

Although this book is recommended for practically anyone, I would recommend this especially to all the programmers out there. We programmers tend to be very left-brained; we like solving those puzzles with elegant algorithms, create nice structures for later use and tinker around, looking how changing this thingy alters that thingy. The right side of our brain gets suppressed quite easily, for a reason or another.

While I mainly speak of my personal experience, I'm sure there are others out there who relate with me, but when I try to present my ideas and thoughts (be it UI or even a website), I get lost, and don't know how to accomplish. I even might have a clear vision inside my head, but it never looks as nice outside of my head. This book gives very concrete, usable and easy to understand examples on how to lay out things. Even if the book uses text as its main design element, the main principles can be applied to some graphic elements as well.

I think the most important, yet easiest to understand, message this book comes across with is CRAP. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, that is.

• Contrast your type readily with other elements to make them stand out;
• Repeat some elements throughout your document/text to make consistency;
• Align your text consciously and in an orderly fashion and not just thrown around; and
• Place together (hence, proximity) information that belongs together.

The book has more extensive and visual explanations about these rules, so it's unnecessary for me to try and explain them here. This is the first half of the book, and, as said, the most important part. If you won't read the whole book, at the very least, read these principles, and you'll come very far, not to mention produce layouts that stand out from the mass of average.

The other part of the book explains about fonts, different families of fonts, what the basic structure of a glyph (a shape that represents e.g. a letter) consists of, and how font families can be mixed and matched. Although this part was a less generalized, and more about the art of fonts, I found this very interesting and gave me, as a web developer, much insight on choosing my fonts properly in the future.

In short, besides the misleading (to me) main title: I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this book, but only hearty recommendations. Since you are reading my blog, there is absolutely no excuse for you not to read this book (except if you already have read the book).

The fact that I don't own the copy I just read (I borrowed it from work) is kind of a bummer, since I can't just pull it off the shelf and refer to it later on.

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On a more LightFrame-y note, the documentation process is progressing slowly but slowly. I have set up a GitHub repository for a reference implementation of the documentation. It uses the Git's submodule feature to refer to the documentation itself. I haven't played around much with submodules, you might need to read up on how to grab the latest version of the documentation itself. Setting up the environment isn't exactly user friendly either, so to just read on the current state of the documentation, I have put a copy on my own temporary server.