All Book Reviews.

Book Reviews: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams

As small business owners, we spend a lot of time preparing materials for presentation. Marketing materials, web pages, business cards, letterhead, and of course our software itself. Even if you don’t operate a business yourself, you probably present written information to other people, in the form of letters or reports or charts, on a very regular basis. This month’s featured book is one that can help you to present this information better. The Non-Designer’s Design Book outlines a set of principles for design and typography that we try to follow every day. The four basic principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

The idea behind Contrast is to avoid using elements that are similar to one another. Things should be either the same, or very different, to provide contrast. For example, you wouldn’t want to have your title be just slightly larger than your regular text, in a very slightly different font. This just makes the reader see that something is off, without knowing what it is, and makes your document look unprofessional. Instead, you should make the title much bigger, or in a very different, bolder, font. The book describes in detail how to choose fonts and styles for contrast. If you start applying this principle, you will see positive effects in your work immediately.

The premise behind Repetition is that you should repeat certain visual elements throughout for your work, such as colors and shapes and line thicknesses. This makes your work look more unified, and gives the reader a sense of familiarity. It can also make the page look more interesting, so that people will be more likely to actually read it. Williams recommends that you think of repetition as being consistent, and then push that idea further to find places to deliberately add repetition. For example, you might use small squares as bullets, and also use the same bullets to mark the end of text in your headers and footers.

The third principle, Alignment, is straightforward. The idea is that everything in your document should be in some way aligned with other things on the page, either vertically or horizontally. Nothing should be arbitrary. This gives the reader clear lines to follow, and makes your work look more sophisticated. Under the principle of alignment, Williams cautions strongly against centering things, because she argues that left or right justified alignments form a much stronger line for the reader’s eyes to follow (with centered text you have two ragged lines instead). We found this surprising at first, because like most people we were taught in school to center headings. However, after reading Williams’s justification, and looking at her examples, we have become believers.

The final principle is Proximity. Proximity states that elements that are logically related to one another should be placed near one another on the page. Similarly, adding white space between elements that are not logically related helps the reader to visually distinguish between them. The most obvious application of this principle lies in the design of business cards, which are easiest to use when related information is clustered together.

The book is filled with examples to drive home these four principles, and help you to understand why Williams thinks that they make sense. The book also includes puzzles and exercises to reinforce these points, all provided in a fun, easy-to-read style. The book is also a helpful reference for understanding certain typography elements like types of fonts (serif or sans-serif, thick/thin transitions, etc.). All in all, if you want to make your reports and presentations and charts look better, or learn a little bit about typography, this is the book that you should buy.

Further reading:

The Non-Designer’s Web Book by Robin Williams and John Tollett - This sequel to The Non-Designer’s Design Book includes a review of the principles established in the first book, applied in detail to web page design. There are also some helpful tips related to meta-tags and other administrative features of web design. We refer to it often.

The PC Is Not A Typewriter by Robin Williams - This little book outlines various typing conventions that started in the era of proportional-font typewriters, and now make your work look amateurish (e.g. typing two spaces after the end of each sentence).

If you would like to buy these books, just click on any of the following links to open a new window and go directly to The Non-Designer’s Design Book, The Non-Designer’s Web Book, or The PC is Not a Typewriter on Amazon’s website. FabTime is an Amazon affiliate.