As a graphic designer who can barely draw, I have always envied those who can incorporate hand drawing to make their designs look unique. When I saw Draw Your Own Fonts: 30 Alphabets to Scribble, Sketch and Make Your Own, by Tony Seddon, I was intrigued. Could this teach me to draw my own type?

In our increasingly digital world, technology enables more and more people to produce work that is polished and tasteful. I’m not saying a designer’s job is easy, but, as Seddon says,

“Anyone can select a typeface, change the point size, and add some color. However, if you take the same piece of text and hand letter it, it’s unique.”

The D.I.Y aesthetic is popular now, as more people move away from the mass-produced and embrace craftsmanship. Online marketplace Etsy is selling around $100 million in goods each month, most of them handmade . In graphic design, hand-drawn type can result in a look that is much more expressive. It can range from rough and raw to cute and child-like.

I decided to try it myself.

The book is a quick and easy read. There is introductory text on hand lettering, developing a skill set, tracing and tampering, and understanding letterforms. The author offers some good advice:

“If you fail to give the basic structure of your letterforms any thought, your efforts are in danger of looking amateurish and ill-considered, a bit like a high school project compared with a professional commission. Even though hand-drawn faces represent the free form, they should be structured and consistent if they’re going to work well.”

The bulk of the book is an assortment of handmade fonts for inspiration, with brief descriptions and suggestions for font pairing. Each one is accompanied by a work sheet  where you can sketch your own. As I went along, I traced, sketched, manipulated, and experimented. I’d like to use some of the featured alphabets, like the 3D, squared-off Bulk, and the fun, molecular Science Lesson. I wish there were more fonts that, while handmade, looked simple and elegant. Maybe those are the ones I need to draw. There are several that are too whimsical for my taste. For example, do we really need an entire alphabet where each letter has wings? Useful technical information is included, like ways to digitize your drawings and turn them into an actual font.

Author Tony Seddon is a graphic designer who also wrote the books Graphic Design for Non-Designers and Thou Shalt not Use Comic Sans. His writing is light and entertaining, and shows a good sense of humor. I’m impressed that he effortlessly references Stevie Wonder’s second-most-annoying song, Part-Time Lover (the first, of course, is I Just Called to Say I Love You) when discussing typography. The book’s design is bright and lively, fitting for the subject matter.

How was my hand-drawn font? Not great. But I loved drawing and sketching and making something with my hands. The book has inspired me to draw more, and to explore more ways to bring some warmth and life to my design work. Maybe someday I’ll produce a font based on my hand-drawn type.

Draw Your Own Fonts: 30 Alphabets to Scribble, Sketch, and Make Your Own, is published by Ivy Press. In the US, Princeton Architectural Press changed the title slightly to Draw Your Own Alphabets: Thirty Fonts to Scribble, Sketch, and Make Your Own. Both are available on Amazon (UK | US).

About the Reviewer

John Clifford is Creative Director at Think Studio, an award-winning graphic design firm in NYC focusing on brand identity, web sites, collateral, packaging, and books. He is also the author of the upcoming book Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design.

Photographed and Reviewed by Carolina de Bartolo

How many type reference books do you need in your library? If you love looking at letters like I do, I’d say the more the merrier. Stock up! Sure, I’ve heard about that whole digital revolution thing, but when it comes to looking at great type, the higher the resolution the greater the eye-candy effect. And even the latest retina screen is nowhere near the resolution of good ol’ ink on paper.

The Anatomy of Type

Cover of The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces by Stephen Coles, with a foreword by Erik Spiekermann, published in 2012 by Harper Design.

A (superfluous) dust jacket of exactly the same design has been removed and discarded. Sorry!

From The Anatomy of Type, the requisite typographic anatomy diagrams.

No surprise considering the aforementioned title.

From The Anatomy of Type, convenient reference for how to use the book.

In addition to the typeface information and samples, each spread includes a nifty cross-reference for related faces in the lower right corner. Facing page here is a basic glossary of terms. And we’re just getting started.

From The Anatomy of Type, type classifications.

While this extensive system of classifying type certainly has its merits, I’m afraid beginners will find it a bit rarified and intimidating. Delineating groups of subclassifications would probably benefit the newbies.

From The Anatomy of Type, sample spread for FF Meta Serif.

A carefully chosen word is set in a triple-digit point size and straddles each spread to give you a macro view of the type’s features.

From The Anatomy of Type, Calibre spread, detail.

The oversized sample letterforms allow every characteristic of each typeface to be beautifully noted with an abundance of playful swooping arrows.

From The Anatomy of Type, Lexicon spread, detail.

Each page begins with precise design details such as the designer, foundry, year of design, etc. You’ll want to memorize this stuff, right?

From The Anatomy of Type, Ed Interlock spread, from the “Display” chapter.

Color variations from page to page make leafing through the book a very pleasant experience.

FontBook

Cover of FontBook, published by FontShop International.

The FontBook app has understandably replaced this massive volume, which is sadly no longer in print.

From FontBook, the bookplate on black endsheets.

The warning reads: “Steal this book and be cursed with papercuts and Postscript errors.” A humorous little touch.

From FontBook, chapter 5 opening spread.

Note the 3 ribbon bookmarks. You’ll need them if you are lucky enough to have this invaluable reference.

From FontBook, detail of the Tarzana Narrow entry.

Each typeface is shown with a full character set in the parent weight. Below that, pangrams are set in all the different weights of the face. To the left of the pangrams, related typefaces are cross-referenced under an eye icon. This much info packed into a tiny space is truly a remarkable achievement of design.

From FontBook, sample spread.

Information about the type designer and date of design is beside the name of the typeface in the black bar.

From FontBook, edge detail.

The yellow chapter openers and black bars within each chapter allow you to easily see and flip to the various sections of the book. Laying open at approximately the center of the book here, you can see why this book is lovingly referred to as the “FontBrick.”

From FontBook, sample spread, Pi & Symbols chapter.

Flip to these pages for an abundance of analphabetic inspiration and ideas. If I was un- or even under-employed, I could peruse the thousands of forms of arrows in this section all the livelong day.

Letter Fountain

Cover of Letter Fountain: The Anatomy of Type (The Ultimate Typeface Reference Guide), by Joep Pohlen, published by Taschen.

The fourth edition of this compendium is a 2010 red dot design award and TDC winner. At 640 pages, there is not much left out of this baby.

From Letter Fountain, comparison of the letter O in four sans serif typefaces.

Diagrams like this help us know the angle of stress in Linotype Helvetica Neue Italic is 12º. And, by comparison, what is it in Linotyope Futura Oblique, you ask? A whopping 39º. Boo on you, Futura Oblique.

From Letter Fountain, page detail.

The impressive breadth of content ranges from the prehistoric origins of writing to this “Choosing a Typeface” section. An extensive historical timeline of typographic events from Gutenberg to the present includes contemporaneous developments in painting. Study this and you are sure to be amongst the most popular typophiles at any party.

From Letter Fountain, spread for Chaparral Pro.

With so much information, this could have been an ordinary monotonous textbook, but the drama of a full bleed black gives the page sequence an occasional pop. In book design as in writing, above all, do not bore the reader.

From Letter Fountain, reproduction of a lovely 1886 type specimen of “No.” characters from J.G. Schelter & Giesecke.

The sizable appendices are printed on a laid brown-paperbag-colored stock which sets these sections apart rather distinctly.

From Letter Fountain, keyboard layout detail.

All the dingbat fonts referenced in the book include these handy keyboard layout references.

Type Navigator

Cover of Type Navigator (The Independent Foundries Handbook), by Jan Middendorp and TwoPoints.net, published by Gestalten.

At 9-by-12 inches, this is the largest format of the four books reviewed here. A standard textbook binding makes it a solid, sturdy edition.

From Type Navigator, chapter opener.

Organized by foundry, each chapter begins with a quote from the foundry’s type designer/s in response to the question: “Why?”. Those big red and blue squares have me asking “why?” as well. More on that later…

From Type Navigator, spread showing display type samples in blue and text type samples in red.

While I admire many Gestalten publications, I found the “red, white and blue” color scheme in this book somewhat disappointing. Red and black alone would have been a simpler and more elegant book design.

From Type Navigator, text type sample spread.

Each of the text type pages shows the featured face in all its weights at display sizes as well as in short paragraphs set at 12/14, 9/12 and 7/10. (Note how much nicer the book looks when you just see the black and red.)

From Type Navigator, detail of text type specimen for Sang Bleu All text block samples are shown in three sizes and three or four weights.

Highlighting a diverse group of underused but excellent faces, the book functions as a full-scale and much needed “Cure for the Common Font.”

From Type Navigator, type in use sample.

This swirly handlettering was created for a magazine layout and is based on the typeface Mommie by Hubert Jocham. Including the type in use images seems like it might have been an after-thought, but their intermittent appearance provides a bit of visual relief from the somewhat uninspired book design.

From Type Navigator, inside back cover, CD insert.

Yes, you’re seeing that right, a book published in 2011 includes a CD (!) of free fonts. Whether you are laughing or crying right now, fear not, the fonts on the CD are mostly garbage…as free fonts on a compact disc would tend to be. Clearly a lame marketing ploy aimed at the typographically challenged.

(Click to enlarge)

Compare and contrast these four type reference books, and find the one/s that are right for you.

The Anatomy of Type is published by Harper Design in the US and by Thames & Hudson in the UK. It is available at Amazon.com (US | UK).

FontBook is published by FontShop and the print version is available used at Amazon.com (US | UK).

Letter Fountain is published by Taschen and is available at Amazon.com (US | UK).

Type Navigator is published by Gestalten and is available at Amazon.com (US | UK).

Carolina de Bartolo teaches typography and design history in San Francisco. She is the designer, author and publisher of the popular typography textbook, Explorations in Typography: Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting, which is now available as an interactive digital book inside the book’s companion app.

Lester Brown, an American environmental analyst and founder of the Worldwatch Institute said:

The communications industry is the only agency possessing the capacity to convey the knowledge necessary for sustainable development to the required extent and in the timeframe we have at our disposal.

These words inspired the editors at Gestalten press to publish Cause and Effect: Visualizing Sustainability, a book that showcases effective communications projects that educate people on the importance of sustainability. An abundance of advertising, graphic design, public art, videos, architecture, and exhibitions fill its 240 colorful pages.

Successful sustainability communication sensitizes people, puts its finger on problems and creates a sense of awareness.

Although The book was co-edited with R. Klanten and S. Ehmann, much of the written content was authored by Stephan Bohle, principal at futurestrategy, a German company that develops communication concepts for “supporting and advancing sustainable development in enterprises, organizations, and society.”

In the preface titled “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” Bohle admits that the communications and design industries are partially responsible for the predicament in which human civilization has found itself. He sites the 1950s economist Victor Lebow who had the idea that buying consumer goods should be ritualized so that people would seek to satisfy their egos through consumption. According to Lebow “Things ought to be consumed, discarded, burned up and replaced at an ever-increasing pace.”

We now know that resources are limited. There is overwhelming evidence that supports the reality of climate change. Fixing our crisis is not just a matter for scientists or technologists. The book’s intro reads:

The real challenge lies in altering people’s behavior patterns. What is required is a cultural transformation…

That’s where communications specialists, designers, and artists step in. The same people that helped to seduce culture into a lifestyle of want and waste can persuade culture to embrace new behaviors. Bohle quotes MoMa curator Paola Antonelli:

Sustainability will become normal, integrated in all the other aspects that make life worth living, like humor, imagination, vision, curiosity, humanity, and love.

From there, the book splits into four chapters, each devoted to a communications-based approach to promoting sustainability.

The projects featured in “Attention is Luxury,” aim to relate complex ecological issues to everyday life. A stellar example is the “Back to the Start,” video created by London’s Nexus Productions for Chipotle. It pulls at the heart strings.

Using stop-motion animation, the film follows a farmer who turns his small farm into an industrial operation. When he realizes that he made the wrong decision, he turns his business back into a more sustainable system.

The chapter called “For They Know Not What They Can Do,” features projects that encourage people to take action. One powerful project in this chapter is the annual report for Austria Solar, designed by Serviceplan. The report was printed with inks that became visible when exposed to sunlight.

In the chapter called “Brave New World” the focus shifts from designed objects to designed systems. It includes public service campaigns and initiatives as well as sustainable products and services. One example is GreeNYC, an environmental initiative campaign with an adorable bird mascot, designed by HunterGatherer in New York.

The last chapter, “Movement Without a Name” discusses the concept of sustainable societies — that is, the notion that sustainable thinking can be embedded into the fabric of daily activities: all actions, routines, and conversations. Several exhibitions are featured in this chapter. “Post Oil City,” by Arch+ and M:AI Museum and ”Into the Open: Positioning Practice,” by Project Projects are among these examples.

From posters to public campaigns, videos to interactive exhibitions, Cause and Effect offers a range of strategies for designers, artists, and communications professionals who want contribute to the sustainability conversation. After all, the subject is becoming less optional by the day.

Cause and Effect: Visualizing Sustainability was published by Gestalten in 2012. It can be purchased at Amazon (US | UK).

About the Reviewer: Aggie Toppins is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BS in Graphic Design from the University of Cincinnati. Aggie has worked for over 10 years at design firms throughout the United States. She currently resides in Chattanooga with her husband Jason and her basset hound Jolly.

Identified as a “place to start” by renowned designer and social entrepreneur, William Drenttel, Designing for Social Change by Andrew Shea, is an insightful guidebook and designer’s co-pilot containing a compilation of case studies that illustrate project concepts, funding resources, processes, strategies, and outcomes. It is a go-to resource for any designer interested or engaged in community-based work. A first-of-its-kind, Designing for Social Change is marked by ten strategies, an action plan of sorts, that pave the way towards project completion, and with any hope, success.

This January, driven by strategy #1 (Immerse Yourself), Andrew, who has reviewed books for DRoB in the past, and I stepped out into the streets of TriBeCa to discuss his recent publication and the often bumpy, yet rewarding ride of designing for social change.

Jenny Venn: Designing for Social Change was inspired by a failed design project that you oversaw. Through your research did you find failure and a quest for aid/correction/redemption as a strong motivator for these designers passionate about social change? 

Andrew Shea: For me this was true, but not for the projects in the book. I looked for a wide range of projects in order to capture a snapshot of the social design field. The designers featured in the book had different motivations because they approached their own, unique design challenge from different stages in their career (half were from students and half were from professional designers), they had different goals for the projects (some of the projects focused on producing strategies or training rather than products or visuals). Also, while some of the projects were initiated by their clients, others were self-initiated.

JV: Did you find the designers interviewed for the book to have a hard-wired passion for social change, innovation, and activism or was it something they happened to stumble upon?

AS: I think all of them became motivated by a sense of sympathy or empathy with their partners and the challenge at hand, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to get into that level of detail. I probably would have posed that question if each project had been carried out by just one designer but each project was carried out by a team. That said, I’m pretty confident that all of the designers in the book became passionate about their projects and about designing for social change because of the people they met and the stories they heard. All of the projects had important human dimensions which motivated them after the they began their research.

JV: The book showcases social change success stories along side failed attempts. Is there a standout project that seemed to have the most impact? Is there a failed attempt that a designer can learn the most from?

AS: I like this question because it gives me a chance to mention that each project became my favorite when I was process of researching it. I think that’s why I selected each. While I looked for specific criteria for the projects (the kind of community/client, the form that the design took, geographic location, from design students/professionals, etc), unique stories behind the projects motivated me to select each. I learned pretty quickly that “success” and “failure” can be tricky to define and that even the projects that “failed” have some positive outcomes. “Made In Midtown” and “Keys To The City” are two projects that come to mind as “successful,” because their outcomes are easy to measure. For “Made in Midtown,” the city’s plan to re-zone midtown Manhattan was altered as a result of the project. “Keys To The City” resulted in scholarship money for music education, revitalized business in downtown Lancaster, PA, and people became more interested in music awareness because they played one of the many pianos that sat on the streets of Lancaster.

JV: Your initial goal in writing Designing for Social Change was to fill an informational void. Did you also hope to bring more people into the design and social change conversation? Have you noticed the book motivating more designers to design for social change? 

AS: Yeah, I definitely wanted to broaden the social change conversation. Many of us social designers mask what we do behind the jargon of our discipline (just think of all of the different names we use for “designing for social change”) which confuses both designers and non-designers from understanding the relevance of what we do. I worked hard to make the text of each project and the design of the book as open and transparent as possible so that it could reach designers from different design disciplines and in all age groups, as well as non-designers who might not know why design should be important to them. My hope is that readers are inspired by at least one project in the book and I’ve been happy to learn about the variety of people who have been using it. I’ve heard about a high school class in Massachusetts that is using the book, college classes around the country reference it as they work on projects in their classes, and I’ve even received some emails from MBA and policy students who are using the book on projects where they engage stakeholders. I love hearing these stories about how the book is being used!

JV: Some case-studies have very clear outcome metrics while others are more ambiguous. Were there any trends on how designers value metrics and what role they play within the process?  

AS: I started the book knowing that a lot of designers want to learn how they can measure the results of their projects but that wasn’t my goal for this book. While I definitely think this is an essential consideration, I wanted to focus on our process of engaging communities because, as I see it, a good process will lead to good outcomes. So while I understand the importance of using metrics to guide projects, I wanted to focus on how to navigate tricky designer-client/community relationships. That said, the book includes traditional awareness campaigns and examples of designers devising a strategy that an organization can use, both of which can be inherently difficult to measure. Also, as I mentioned above, projects like Keys to the City or Made in Midtown are clear examples of design having a measurable impact.

JV: What did you learn about the design for social change community that you didn’t know before? 

AS: I met lots of educators who have been teaching community-based partnership classes and designers who have been working pro bono for decades. It shows that there are many designers whose experiences and insights can add a lot to this conversation.

JV: If this book happened 5 years earlier or 5 years later what would be different about the content? 

AS: If it happened five years later, I probably would have been flooded with submissions since this kind of work has quickly grown in popularity. If it happened five years earlier, there may not have been a hungry audience to welcome it.

JV: What were the biggest challenges, surprises, or unexpected gifts you encountered while writing Designing for Social Change? 

AS: One surprise was realizing the importance of good follow up questions. Many of the projects became really interesting after I asked for clarifications about specific details or follow up questions about aspects of a project. My biggest challenge was trying to get such detailed information from contributors, which gives me a chance to say how great it was to work with the amazing people who submitted projects. Of course they were already so busy working on other projects, teaching classes, and running companies. I asked them to fill out a long questionnaire and to have a dialogue with me about their projects, and they were all incredibly gracious with their time throughout that process.

JV: What change did writing this book create within you as a designer? Within your design process? Do you follow all of these strategies? 

AS: Good question, I started the project because I wanted to learn more about how to frame community/client-based projects, troubleshoot problems that arise during these projects, double-check the results of these projects, and learn more about how to fund these projects. All of these goals can help empower designers to take more calculated risks and can lead to more powerful outcomes. So, more to your question, writing this book helped me to refine my design process and reflect on these 20 projects as I work through my projects. Many of the strategies come naturally to me, but I always consult with these strategies, and I’m always looking for more.

JV: Is there any particular reason that there are 10 strategies? How did you narrow it down to these 10?

AS: There’s no specific reason, though it happened to be a good number for the book since there were 20 case studies. For awhile I hovered at 8 strategies, which came from observations that I made from my projects and the insights of contributing designers. Then I started to read books and articles from activists, social workers, government agencies, universities, political organizers, etc, which helped me to refine the strategies that I already had while providing me with the last two.

JV: Were these 10 strategies utilized by all of the designers you included in the book? Were there any unique strategies that weren’t included? 

AS: Some strategies were used by everyone, like “Immerse Yourself”, but not all of the designers used all the strategies. These strategies are important considerations when working with clients/community partners. One strategy that I didn’t include comes from Project H: “start locally and scale globally.” The main reason I didn’t include it is because the projects in the book are based on the US, not throughout the world.

JV: You not only wrote the book but you also designed it. What came first – the visuals or the text?

AS: I proposed a design when I pitched the book to PAPress, but then spent over a year writing and didn’t think about the design. I proposed an updated design after I finished writing, but PAPress liked my first design better. The cover came last. By listing the 10 strategies on the cover, I was able to lend more transparency to the process of designing for social change.

JV: The book has been out for a bit of time now. If you could go back and change one thing what would it be?

AS: As far as the book’s content and design, I did everything I set out to do. That said, I would have worked on publicizing the book prior to it being released. I buried myself in the work and forgot to build buzz for it. I was fortunate to have PAPress publicizing it for me and the book has received some great coverage as a result. It has recently been reprinted, and is now being translated into Japanese and Korean. So I’m actually very happy with how well it has been received.

JV: If you could give a designer only one piece of advice on designing for social change what would it be?

AS: Partner with people/organizations you respect and work on topics/issues that you care about. This will help you remain interested in the project and committed to seeing it through, especially when the project reaches difficult junctures, which it will.

Largely considered a launching pad for a designer’s community-based voyage, Designing for Social Change should also be celebrated as an esteemed illustration of a final destination. Partially, due to its well-organized strategies providing a clear means to an end but more importantly because the text itself is a picture-perfect example of successful human-centered design. Andrew’s work embodies knowledge gaps filled, wrongs turned right, passion that has found form, communities invigorated and inspired, and in the end, success through failure.

Designing for Social Change is published by Princeton Architectural Press  and can be purchased from Amazon (US | UK).

About the Reviewer

Jenny Venn is a designer, writer, educator, and founder of StudioJenVenn, a multidisciplinary design studio that is on sortie from jenvenn.com in Laramie, Wyoming.

Photos: Cole LeMaster, StudioJenVenn intern  Special thanks: Mark Robertson, TriBeCa notetaker

For those interested in graphic design theory, there are two compelling books on the market with nearly identical 
titles: Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field, by Miami University professor Helen Armstrong, 
and Graphic Design Theory: Graphic Design in Context by NC State professor Meredith Davis. 
Although the books sound similar, they take different yet complementary approaches to the subject.

Armstrong’s book is a collection of excerpts from groundbreaking texts written by designers, such as Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography. Readers may appreciate these writings as extensions of their authors’ studio practices. Davis’ book, which separates generative theory from critical theory, often draws on texts from outside of the design field. Davis shows how concepts from Gestalt psychology, linguistics, and political philosophy, 
for example, inform the ways we think about graphic design.

The telling of theory in Armstrong’s book is implicit. One considers the ideas by reading texts that embody them. Davis’ book is explicit. She offers detailed explanations of a range of theories and is often instructional. Armstrong’s book is perhaps more accessible, while Davis’ book is more comprehensive.

Some Background Information:

Helen Armstrong’s Graphic Design Theory was published in 2009 by Princeton Architectural Press. It is 
part of the Design Briefs series which strives to make “affordable, beautifully designed” books that inspire “both students and seasoned practitioners who want an overview of the fundamentals of design.” Princeton Architectural Press has published 16 books in this series, often in collaboration with students and faculty 
at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

Meredith Davis’ Graphic Design Theory was published in September 2012 by Thames & Hudson. It is 
part of the Graphic Design in Context series, a partnership with professors at NCState and three 
other institutions (Carnegie Mellon, CalArts, and The University of the Arts).

A Few Surface Similarities:

Both books are loosely organized by a similar chronology: one that begins with the industrial revolution and ends with the present day. Neither book is a history, but both refer to historical ideas in order to show how contemporary ideas evolved. Both books contain glossaries of essential vocabulary. Importantly, both books claim to be introductions to graphic design theory with the hope that readers will deepen their studies with supplementary texts.

A Deeper Look Inside:

Armstrong’s book is divided into three sections: “Creating the Field,” 
“Building on Success,” and “Mapping the Future.” Each section is followed by a subsection called “Theory at Work,” a portfolio of relevant graphic design that demonstrates the theories discussed in that section.

In “Creating the Field,” Armstrong includes texts such as “The Futurist Manifesto” by F.T. Marinetti and “The Crystal Goblet” by Beatrice Ward. These readings show graphic design as a developing discipline. She unfolds the story in a way that humanizes graphic design heroes:

Avant-Garde designers had guts and vision. Most were 
young people, just in their twenties. They wanted nothing 
less than to change the world.

In “Building on Success,” Armstrong explains how graphic design went from a collection of radical ideas to a formalized profession. From utopian visions of objectivity with “Grid and Grid Philosophy” by Josef Müller-Brockmann to the simulated experiences of Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas, Armstrong offers readers an assortment of viewpoints from the Modernist and Post-Modernist schools of thought.


The resulting International Style leapt from Europe to the United States, spreading values of neutrality, objectivity, and rationality expressed through tightly gridded layouts and restricted typography… In the 1960s rebellion broke out.

Lastly, in the final section of the book, “Mapping the Future,” Armstrong points to the future of graphic design with texts about the nature of interactivity and participatory culture. Here, readers will find 
 “The Designer as Author” by Michael Rock and “Designing Our Own Graves” by Dmitri Siegel. She concludes her book with an essay by Ellen and Julia Lupton, “Univers Strikes Back,” which is about the new universalism of networked individuals:

 The new universality pursues not a fixed, closed totality but an open infinity. It emanates from particular situations, from individual users solving specific problems.

Meredith Davis’ book is divided into two parts, each with several sections. In “Part 1: Laying the Groundwork,” Davis introduces key concepts with sections titled “Communication Models,” “The Nature of Representation,” and “The Dimensions of Context.”


You are in a restaurant with a friend and are planning to go 
to a movie together after dinner. You will be driving separate cars but your friend does not know how to get to the theater. 
So you draw the route between the restaurant and the theater on a napkin…

In the context section, Davis writes about the 
“formative and illustrative roles for design” in society—that is, how 
design shapes culture or expresses the current state of culture. Among her varied examples are Thomas Jefferson’s design of the University 
of Virginia, Listerine advertisements from the 1940s–70s, and 
Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s 1998 book S, M, L, XL. Davis also writes about materiality—media and tools, surfaces and structures—
as elements that contribute to meaning.

The specific visual, spatial, auditory, kinesthetic, and temporal characteristics of form are content.

In “Part 2: Theory from 1900 to the Present,” Davis demonstrates 
how foundational design concepts have been shaped and reshaped 
by cultural forces and technology since the industrial revolution. 
Readers begin the chapter by viewing a Lewis Hine photograph of a child laborer, Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.


The study of language holds particular significance 
for graphic designers whose work involves the combination 
of visual and verbal elements according to social and 
cultural conventions.

In the first section of Part 2, “The Language of the Visual World,” Davis introduces semiotic theory, the study of signs and signification, as it originated with Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce. This section includes concepts such as langue and parole, vernacular form, taxonomies of signs, pictogrammatic systems, and lastly, myth, as it was defined by the French literary critic Roland Barthes.


Any discussion about the history of design involves the question of perspective. Should we follow an art-historical canon, working from the idea of connoisseurship to 
highlight exemplary objects and their famous makers? 
Or should we privilege other critical filters that place 
the interpretation of design theory in larger social, 
technological, and economic contexts?

In the sections called “Modernism” and “Post-Modernism,” Davis, like Armstrong, devotes attention to design’s trend towards objectivity and universalism and its consequent transition into vernacular appropriation and its obsession with authorship. But Davis frames her history lesson in terms of world events. For example, she describes how industrialism, with its flux of immigrant workers and simultaneous production of consumer goods, resulted in an early Modernist ethos:



Out of these circumstances arose new missions for design: the growth of advertising to support a burgeoning world of goods and new lifestyles; searches for the appropriate expression of a new age and form that transcended specific cultural experiences; and a social conscience that viewed design as capable of building a utopian future…”

Davis favors an approach to design history that frames it within the context of technology and culture rather than the commonly used method of presenting a “sequence of discrete object styles” or “the products of individual genius.”

Davis ends her section on Post-Modernism with an introduction to the notion of hyperreality. While Armstrong’s inclusion of an excerpt from Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas implies these lessons, Davis presents the reader with ideas that refer to the primary sources of these theories, namely the work of Umberto Eco, an Italian semiotician, and Jean Baudrillard a French philosopher and sociologist.

Lastly, in a section called “A New Paradigm,” Davis shares theories that discuss the effect of new media on design and culture. Both Davis and Armstrong, in her own way, recast users of design as participants of design—a shift that connotes the changing relationship between designers and audiences.

Davis reaches for insights from Marshall McLuhan. His text, The Medium is the Massage, was a prescient look at the nature of communications media and its influence on culture. Armstrong draws on contemporary designers—Dmitri Siegel, Jessica Helfand, and Kenya Hara, among others—whose essays, one could argue, build on McLuhan’s ideas.

Unique to Davis’ text is her focus on systems. Davis lays out the importance of “systems thinking,” over “object thinking,” as the future of design. She also takes care to define what systems are:


Graphic designers tend to define systems as something they make… The complexity of contemporary design problems, however, argues for a much broader understanding of systems and system behavior than we find in visual systems. Instead of thinking of systems only as things, we need to think of them as things that are affected by what we make.

Since Davis’ book opens with diagrams for communications models, it is fitting that she moves to close it by sharing diagrams for experience models. This builds on her enthusiasm for systems thinking and segues into a discussion on service design, interactivity, and design research (including ethnographic research).


Under an object-centered, mechanical definition of design practice, the designer is seen as an expert who decides 
on the attributes of a finished product which is delivered 
to management to solve a problem. Under an organic, 
systems-oriented definition of practice, opportunities and insights emerge from anywhere within the organization or system. The designer steps into this context as a facilitator 
who builds consensus around ideas that evolve under 
changing conditions.

Where is design headed?

One can infer from the selections in Armstrong’s text, that she sees design becoming more democratized. Designers are making the tools and templates that arm non-designers with the ability to make design. Everyone in the future will be, at least in part, a designer. This frees professional designers to take on more challenging, perhaps even activist, roles in society.

According to Meredith Davis, it seems that graphic design will continue to be systems-oriented rather than object-oriented which 
is to say that designers will be more occupied by ideas than artifacts. 
As such, graphic design will become increasingly interdisciplinary.


As a profession, the contemporary practice of graphic design shows all the requisite behaviors of more mature fields. It 
has a documented history, standards of fair practice, interest 
in methodology, and the beginnings of a research culture. 
As a discipline, however, graphic design—or whatever name we assign to its contemporary iteration—is still exploring the extent of its domain.

Which book is right for you?

To paraphrase Davis, there is no single, unified theory of design. Armstrong’s book may rest well with the casual design reader or the young student because it is an introduction to theory by way of light historical reference and contemporary discourse. Armstrong’s book may be a good first dip into theory, while Davis’ book is more of a lap-after-lap swim.

Davis’ book is densely packed with influential concepts. It is a product of her own scholarship as she is an erudite researcher. Her Graphic Design Theory may be over the head of the casual reader and will certainly challenge a young student. For the committed practitioner and the advanced design student, Davis’ book is a treasury of thought that presents the reader with a wide range of names and titles to underline in search of more knowledge.

In short, there is a place for both books on the serious graphic designer’s shelf. The two may function well as companion texts.

Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field is published by Princeton Architectural Press and is available at Amazon.com (US | UK).

Graphic Design Theory: Graphic Design in Context is published by Thames & Hudson and is available at Amazon.com (US | UK).

  About the Reviewer: Aggie Toppins is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BS in Graphic Design from the University of Cincinnati. Aggie has worked for over 10 years at design firms throughout the United States. She currently resides in Chattanooga with her husband Jason and her basset hound Jolly.

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Have you ever wanted to learn interface design in a single day? Well, you won’t be able to, at least not thoroughly. You would, however, be in pretty good shape if you started that day by flipping through the Design Axioms deck. The set of 16 foundational principles contained within the illustrated cards provide a great place to start learning the essential rules of interface design.

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Design Axioms was created by Juhan Sonin, an MIT Lecturer with nearly 20 years of interface design experience. The deck of cards are grouped into four main areas; Let Data Scream, Prototype Like Crazy, What Interface?, and Know Thy Code. Each card has an illustration on the front and several short paragraphs on the back explaining ideas such as, if everything is important nothing is important:

Trying to make every single thing attention-grabbing is a classic design mistake. What you consider most important should – certainly, clearly, undeniably – be the single most important aspect of your design.

There are also cards for each of the folks who contributed content to the deck, Juhan Sonin, Luke Wroblewski, Andrei Herasimchuk, and Dirk Knemeyer. The illustrations provide visual metaphors for each of the axioms, but at times I felt they were stylistically inconsistent between cards. One other card comes in the deck and seemed to be a shortlist of the key points found within the other cards, but at first it looked like an index page and threw me for a loop when I couldn’t find the corresponding topics anywhere else.

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Overall, Design Axioms is an excellent reference deck for the beginning interface designer and provides a good set of principles to start building an educational foundation upon.

Learn more about Design Axioms here and buy the book from Amazon.

About the Reviewer Dominic Flask is a designer by nature, a teacher by application and a thoughtful companion by friendship. You can view his design portfolio here and his in-progress work on Dribbble.

Hear. See. Think. Draw. This is the approach to visual note taking that author Mike Rohde, illustrator of the wildly popular book Rework, outlines in The Sketchnote Handbook. While most of us take notes in order to retain information, and those of us who are designers tend to doodle in the margins, “sketchnoting” is a much more thoughtful approach to getting the most out of meetings, presentations and other varied discussions. Mike shares his process with readers in this thoroughly illustrated book by explaining the approach and practice of taking sketchnotes and then providing some real life examples and hands-on exercises.

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The book is divided into seven sections that explain the what, why and how of the sketchnote method before diving into explanations of different types of sketchnoting, tips and tricks to making the process effective and enjoyable, and some important instructions and exercises for drawing basic shapes, people and type. The book is a friendly size which fits nicely in your hand or on your desk as a reference tool. The whole thing is printed in grayscale with a nice pop orange to add dimension to the sketched format.

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What really takes the book from instructional to engaging is the way that Mike lets his personality come through onto the pages. He shares the fact that the idea was born from frustration, recounts personal sketchnoting experiences and shares his own views with the reader:

I coined a name for this process: sketchnotes. Sketchnotes aren’t dry and detailed but are simple and clear. My personality was baked into my sketchnotes like chocolate chips in a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

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The book also comes in a video edition that includes bonus instructional material about the process and practice of taking sketchnotes. One of the final steps in the sketchnoting process is to share your work with others and Mike does an exceptional job of sharing information about the book with potential readers. You can find more information, including pictures, a sample chapter, an overview video, and links to share your own sketchnotes at http://rohdesign.com/book.

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Mike is a master of the sketchnoting process and the book will definitely inspire you to reevaluate those scrawled notes from last week’s board meeting. I have personally attempted to sketchnote several times since picking up the book and the process really has worked. While my notes still aren’t very pretty, the information I have retained has increased and I have left meetings feeling more confident that I understand what was discussed.

The Sketchnote Handbook is published by Peachpit and is available from Amazon (US | UK)

About the Reviewer Dominic Flask is a designer by nature, a teacher by application and a thoughtful companion by friendship. You can view his design portfolio here and his in-progress work on Dribbble.

The holidays are a time for family and that includes children, of all ages. With that in mind I thought it would be great to take time out and review Little Big Books, a great new collection of illustrations for children’s picture books published by Gestalten. Sorted by illustrator, the book takes a thorough survey of the modern industry of children’s book illustration letting the reader visually explore the vast variety of aesthetic differences contained within.

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The book contains work from 100 different artists representing countries from all across the globe. Each artist has a two-page spread that includes a short bio and credits for the illustrations shown. Interjected in between the showcase of work are five interviews, one each with Kitty Crowther, Larry Lempert, Martin Slisbury, Johanna Brock-Lacassin, and Claire Walters. The interviews cover broad topics from the psychology of picture books to publishing rights and licensing, all of which help you understand the world that these illustrators are living in.

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Even though this is a book of children’s illustration, you shouldn’t start thinking this is just for the little ones. The book does a great job of exploring some more complex issues that you might not expect at first glance:

As one of the first storytelling media we encounter, picture books help us to comprehend the world around us and to decipher pictorial representations of its many denizens.

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The large number of different illustrators represented in the book provide a wide variety of styles of illustration that range from the adorably cute to the seriously somber and much more in between. Each page is a new visual adventure and there is plenty for everyone’s own aesthetic taste, making the book an excellent buy for illustrators, visual artists and designers alike, as well as children of all ages.

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Little Big Books is published by Gestalten and is available from Amazon (US | UK)

About the Reviewer Dominic Flask is a designer by nature, a teacher by application and a thoughtful companion by friendship. You can view his design portfolio here and his in-progress work here.

Here at the Designers Review of Books we all have lengthy Amazon wish lists. While the holidays are a time of giving, they are also a good excuse to pick out one or two of the top books on our list and reward ourselves for another year of hard work, study and accomplishment. Listed below are some of our reviewers most desired reads. Any of them would make great gifts, whether they’re gifts for someone else or just for yourself. Happy Holidays and Happy Reading.

Eames: Beautiful Details by Eames Demetrios Buy It from Amazon

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Buy It from Amazon

The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero Buy the eBook

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer by Vivian Meier Buy It from Amazon

Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane Buy It from A Book Apart

The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces by Stephen Coles Buy It from Amazon

Punk: An Aesthetic by Jon Savage Buy It from Amazon

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink Buy It from Amazon

Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro Buy It from A Book Apart

The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Anderson, illustrated by Sanna Annukka Buy It from Amazon

Designers, typographers, illustrators and letterers the world over will already be familiar with the work of Louise Fili. Her book covers, restaurant identities, food packaging labels and lettering have defined excellence in typography since the mid-1980s. No matter how much of her work you may have spent countless hours reviewing it is unlikely that you understand her as well as you will after reading Elegantissima: The Design & Typography of Louise Fili.

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Elegantissima is divided into 6 different sections that follow a loose chronological time table of Louise’s career. Starting with her career in publishing, the sections are: books, restaurants, packaging, identities, designer/author and posters & postage. The work presented in each section gives you a great idea of just how much has gone into her prolific career and will keep you turning the pages while wondering what possibly could come next.

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Each section contains a series of case studies with personal stories about the projects, which is where you really start to understand where Louise was coming from and how she created the work. Referencing her work for Irving Farm:

A generic silver coffee bag with a logo designed by a boat painter (yes, a boat painter) made it clear that an intervention was in order. We agreed to print one coffee bag with separate flavor stickers. The bag design, which reinterpreted some elements from an original sticker that was a sentimental favorite, employed engravings and a hand-tooled font.

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The book is, of course, amazingly well-designed and laid out and the production quality is on par with the excellence of the work shown within. With right at 250 pages the book does a great job of covering more than just the highlights of Louise’s career and is written almost entirely in her own words, which is what makes it so personal and intriguing.

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Out of all of the pieces shown in the book, the ones that moved me the most as examples of Louise’s eye for detail and excellence were her designs for copyright pages. Normally one of the most boring pages in any book, she chose to use the details on the page to illustrate images relative to the stories in the book rather than just tell you when and where it was published. She carried the idea through to this book as well and the copyright page inside is the icing on top of the cake, even though it’s at the beginning.

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Elegantissima is published by Princeton Architectural Press and is available from Amazon (US | UK)

About the Reviewer Dominic Flask is a designer by nature, a teacher by application and a thoughtful companion by friendship. You can view his design portfolio here and his in-progress work here.