With the explosion of interest in publishing with the Macintosh, a number of good books on typography have appeared—many of them quite good. The Verbum Book of Typography is unique. Where many of the books deal with the aesthetics of typography as an “invisible art,” this book dives in and tries to cover all aspects of words on paper, from the creation of a digital face to its use in page layout programs, and on to the more avant garde approaches to the field.
Like the other books in the Verbum series, it is full of illustrations, tips, and personalities.
One chapter follows Joe Treacy as he creates the popular Forever typeface using Altsys Fontographer. Treacy himself describes the steps he took and his reasons for taking them. In another chapter FontStudio’s features are examined. FreeHand and Illustrator are discussed in various frameworks: as tools used for preliminary drawing of letterforms, in the creation of ornaments, and as compositional tools on their own. Even paint programs get into the act for special effects. One chapter, in fact, is devoted to providing an overview of the programs that are used in the creation of typography and typographic effects: from “small” programs like ATM and TypeAlign, to the page layout programs. Curiously, although Brøderbund’s TypeStyler is covered, Letraset’s LetraStudio is not.
Throughout much of the book, the line which distinguishes between type and illustration is blurred. This is quite evident in the Gallery section of the book, where some of the examples are meant to be looked at more than read.
With a copyright date of 1991, the book is already showing signs of needing an update; some of the screen shots show early versions of software, and while the book is System-7 compliant, it is not System-7 savvy. Bulleted items have been stuck in here and there in an effort to keep the book up to date in a world where a year is a technological age.
This is an exciting book, full of inspiring examples and lots of good information, but it is not the book we would recommend to the beginning desktop publisher, who hasn’t learned the rules yet, much less how to break them safely. But for designers looking for new ideas, or for those who want an overview of the field, The Verbum Book of Digital Typography is a good bet.
The Verbum Book of Digital Typography
Michael Gosney, Linnea Dayton, and Jennifer Ball
$29.95; 208 pages.
M&T Books
501 Galveston Drive
Redwood City, CA 94063
The lure of digital painting lies largely in its ability to allow computer artists to work spontaneously and with textural effects. From the earliest Mac days, MacPaint captured the imaginations of artists fascinated with fill patterns, rubber band lines, and—perhaps most importantly—the Undo command.
However, for several years, most high-end illustration has been done with PostScript programs such as Aldus FreeHand and Adobe Illustrator because of the higher resolution output which was available. Paint programs were originally limited to the resolution of the screen—72 dots per inch on a Macintosh. As the computing power of later Macs increased, so has the ability to create high resolution bitmaps. The result is that today’s paint programs can finally compete for the attention of artists who do not want to be limited to low resolution “jaggies.”
The Verbum Book of Digital Painting steps in to offer a survey of the possibilities, and it does the job admirably.
The first few chapters provide an overview of the field, focusing on both hardware and software considerations. The survey of Mac software starts with the original MacPaint, and continues through SuperPaint and PixelPaint to image editing programs such as ImageStudio and Photoshop. (A scan of a photograph is a bitmapped image.) Non-Mac programs, such as TIPS for the IBM and Deluxe Paint III for the Amiga, are also shown. Many concepts are covered, from antialiasing and dithering to file formats and ray tracing.
Each of the next few chapters follows an individual artist through the step-by-step development of a particular project. For many, this will be the most valuable section of the book, since it provides insights into both the techniques and the thinking processes of several artists.
The final section contains a Glossary and an Index. Each of the books in the Verbum series has followed this general outline, and the formula has once again proven to be valuable. The Verbum Book of Digital Painting provides a good overview of the field as well as serving as an inspiration for younger artists working in the medium.
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