Looking Good in Print (Taschenbuch)

Looking Good in Print (Taschenbuch)
von Roger C. Parker, Patrick Berry

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This book is an excellent choice for anyone aspiring to become a successful desktop-publishing professional. In fact, it'stheguide, long respected in the desktop-publishing community, and this fourth edition has more examples of good and bad designs than ever.

Parker and Berry first discuss essential design concepts such as relevance, proportion, consistency, contrast, restraint, and attention to detail. Next the authors teach you about basic tools for organizing layouts: grids, columns, gutters, headlines, kickers, captions, bullet lists, and pull quotes, to name a few. They delve into the intricacies of typography and font families, highlighting such concepts as type size, alignment, and leading and kerning. Next you learn about the use of white space and about rulers and accents such as borders, boxes, drop shadows, and bleeds. The authors discuss illustrations, clip art, backgrounds, charts, diagrams, tables, and maps and advise you on positioning those elements on a page. There's also a lot of information on selecting, resizing, and placing photographs. A full-color chapter illustrates how to choose color and use spot color, full color, and duotones.

At this point the authors move from theory to hands-on projects--you apply the design concepts that they have already put forth. You learn about the appropriate design, graphic, and text elements for newsletters, ads, catalogs, and other business correspondence. Each chapter in this section offers plenty of illustrations and ends with a checklist of reminders that you can refer to as you design.

Especially useful are chapter 12, which features common design mistakes along with illustrations and explanations of what's wrong, and chapter 13, which highlights redesigns of poorly produced publications. The latter is a before-and-after glimpse of designs of almost all types of publications, from newsletter to survey. These two chapters drive home succinctly and with great visual impact every point of design that the authors have previously discussed. Finally, the appendix offers extra tips on printing in color, and choosing image databases, paper, and service bureaus.

The authors don't refer to the Windows or Macintosh operating systems or to any software programs. The understanding is that you will learn how to use your software tools elsewhere and consult the book for elements of design. That's a reasonable goal, as the authors maintain a clear, concise tone and offer many tips that are tangential but still relevant to the subject matter. For example, the chapter on type has a short sidebar on the difference between kerning and tracking and a longer sidebar on font substitution. All in all, this book functions well as both a how-to manual for beginning designers and as a design reference for more advanced designers.--Kathleen Caster

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There is an argument for including a guide to good layout with every DTP application sold. Would you attempt to drive a car, or fly a plane for the first time, having read only the owner's handbook? While the consequences of poor layout may be less catastrophic than a road accident the results can nonetheless be ugly and unpleasant.

Whatever your view, if such a style guide were mandatory,Looking Good in Printwould be an excellent candidate. Roger Parker and Patrick Berry have achieved the difficult task of covering all the important design fundamentals in a book probably no bigger than the manual that came with your DTP application, and certainly a lot more readable.

The emphasis throughout is on providing you with the information you need to design better-looking, and therefore more successful publications. If you read only the first two chapters you will be at least as well acquainted with the basic principles of page layout as most magazine designers appear to be.

Probably the best advice--not to go anywhere near your computer until you have sketched out a few ideas with pencil and paper--comes right at the start. Every aspect of theory and practice discussed is illustrated with clear examples which occupy at least half the available space. This means you can learn quickly--by seeing how it should be done, rather than reading about it.

The authors rightly recognise that good design, especially for beginners, is more often a case of not getting it wrong, than getting it right. So, for the crash course, once you've read the first two chapters, skip to the last two--Common Design PitfallsandRedesign, which display in graphic detail all the ugly layout accidents just waiting to befall you and how to avoid them. --Ken McMahon

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