Book Reviews: Two Books on Typography from North Light Books
Typography is more than merely choosing a typeface and size, although you’d never know it to look at the work of typographical novices. This category includes most of my students in Desktop Publishing classes at The Savannah College of Art and Design. These students have already had a class in conventional typography, but they still have a long way to go. They may understand the theory of specifying type, but that’s a lot different than actually doing it, one line at a time.
One of the main problems with computer typography using today’s laser printers is that even bad work looks good to a neophyte. Hey, it’s clean, neat, and straight—what more could you ask? Well, there’s quite a bit more to look for, and How To Get Great Type Out Of Your Computer would be a good place to start. Author James Felice is both a professional typesetter and a former managing editor at Publish magazine.
As stated in the preface, this book is directed at two groups: (1) the people who know type but are having trouble learning how to control it with a computer, and (2) the people who are at home with their computer, but who are newcomers to typography.
Felice gives a good overview of the field, and the book is packed with tips that will help you understand and achieve better results in your printed work.
He begins with a chapter on picking the right tools. His hardware recommendations are modest—I would hate to live with a 20 Mbyte hard drive and 2 Mbytes of RAM. Of course, he also recommends that you avoid INITs and Desk Accessories because they use a lot of RAM.
Once Felice gets into actual typography sections of the book, he presents a large number of truly helpful hints, many of which I have not seen elsewhere. For instance, he suggests that you spend some time examining the manuscript before you start deciding on font choices and column width. Search for double spaces, tabs instead of paragraph indents, multiple returns, and manually added page numbers. Get rid of these problems early on, in order to avoid compounded problems later.
Felice also strongly suggests that you make style sheets for all of your documents. Style sheets not only help to guarantee consistency throughout your document, they can also save you lots of time.
The chapters on typeface choices and typographic conventions are complete and helpful. Felice gets very specific with his recommendations for hyphenation and justification specifications.
Felice’s book condenses years of typographic experience into 112 topics, all of which are well-written and helpful. Highly recommended.
How To Get Great Type Out Of Your Computer
By James Felice
North Light Books
$22.95 (136 pages)
Another book from North Light gets off to such a bad start that it’s hard to take it seriously. The introductory pages of Desktop Publisher’s Easy Type Guide contain six glaring examples of widows and orphans, those leftover fragments of paragraphs that look so awkward at the tops and bottoms of columns of type.
There is very little in the way of helpful text in this reference book. The author spends a few pages on short descriptions of the qualities of the twenty type families covered in the book.
The main body of the book—150 or so pages out of the book’s 176—consists of typeface sample pages. These are the approximate equivalent of what you would get by using the shareware program “The Typebook” on your own fonts—each face is shown at several different sizes and leading values. This section might help you to decide on new faces to purchase.
Near the end of the book, the author includes a list of “similar” typefaces—typefaces that might be substituted for others with a similar “feel.” Some of his recommendations seem questionable to me; he suggests that you substitute Avant Garde for Futura, or Souvenir for Benguiat.
Here’s an interesting quote from the Introduction: “While it is true that graphic designers and professional typographers may cringe at some of the conclusions in this book, the fact is that the vast majority of readers are not graphic designers or typographers. This book is about reality.” You’ve been warned.
Desktop Publisher’s Easy Type Guide
By Don Dewsnap
Rockport Publishers
(Distributed by North Light Books)
$19.95 (176 pages)
reviewed by Jim Alley
Professor of Computer Art, The Savannah College of Art and Design
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