How to Understand and Use Design and Layout, by Alan Swann
Less than useful (two stars)
(Review posted 28 Oct 1999 12:12:12)

(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)

A frustrating book. My initial impression is that I could have written virtually all of it myself.

The book consists of a large number of 1/2 or 3/4 page essays, superficially describing some aspect of design (color, line, type, shape-with-type, etc), and urging the reader (basically) to try lots of things and see what looks the best. In between the essays are small illustrations of design drafts or finished products, with short and generally unenlightening captions. I expected more!

There are a few bits of concrete advice in the book, but many are so vague as to be unhelpful ("consider the use of color in your design"), and some are simply wrong. For instance, it's hard to credit the statement "it is unlikely that a light, classic serif type will mix with a heavy, sans serif face", when it's printed in a light oldstyle serif face, under a heading that's in (you guessed it!) a heavy sans. On another page, some advice about the cost of color choices seems to show a misunderstanding of how the four-color printing process works. On at least two occasions, the text refers to an illustration "on this page", when no illustration matching the text description actually appears anywhere in the book.

The diction is odd and stilted, as though it were imprefectly translated from the Korean, or perhaps the Icelandic. Can You Parse This: "The emphasis in describing this product range is the link between acceptable branding style described by choice of type and the various options in positioning the visual content." Huh?

Another oddity: the book mentions computers exactly once, in a confused sentence about phototypesetting. Given that the majority of design projects these days use the computer in at least one stage of design (and often many more), this seems unaccountable.

Perhaps there are things in this book that would be helpful to someone with a cognitive style very different from mine, but I found it disappointing, and the few possibly-valid pieces of advice and interesting illustrations not worth the price or the time.