Once Upon a Bookshelf

I’ve found the Logo Lounge books and website to be one of my favourite resources when doing logo work. Catharine Fishel, one of the co-authors of the books and an editor for LogoLounge.com, also wrote How to Grow as a Graphic Designer.

Each chapter in this book (and they are all quite short - only a few pages each) talks about a different Graphic Designer and works in a bit of advice that the designer is giving. A lot of the advice this book presents could be applied to any career, really. What I really did like about how this book was presented was that it took people from so many different areas of expertise in the Graphic Design field. Fishel also made it feel like you were sitting down with the Graphic Designer the chapter is about and having a conversation with them, instead of writing the book so it was just spouting out advice at you.

Of course, there were chapters I enjoyed better and got more out of than others. The ones that stick out particularly in my mind are those about Diti Katona of Concrete, Noreen Morioka of AdamsMorioka, Michael Bierut of Pentagram and Terry Marks of Terry Marks Design.

I probably would have retained more of what it said if I had only read a small bit at a time, but it’s arranged in an easy to navigate way so that if I need to go back at some point in time, I’ll be able to find what I’m looking for easily. Even now, after reading through it so quickly and not getting as much from it as I probably could have, I’ve put some of the advice it has given to good use - mainly making a list of goals and where I want to be a few years from now. Hopefully, I will have the motivation to actually work towards these goals.

I don’t normally blog about the Graphic Design and reference books I read, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to share this one. If you’re a fairly new Graphic Designer, or studying Graphic Designer, this is a positively wonderful little book. Heck, even if you’re a veteran Graphic Designer or someone who even just understands typography and wants to improve themselves for kicks, this is a good book to pick up. Because it’s more than just reference - it is so amusing.

The book is split up into two different parts, The Ten Commandments of Typography, and then, flipped over and upside down is Type Heresy: Breaking the Ten Commandments of Typography. The first half talks about the rules you should abide by in typography - “Thou shalt lay headlines large and at the top of the page” and “Thou shalt employ no other type size than 8pt to 10pt for body copy” for example - and gives example of each of the rules in use. The other half of the book, obviously, talks about breaking the rules and why you should break the rules - again providing lovely examples of how it can be done.

The main points brought across in this book is that you need to know the rules before you can successfully break them, and that continually following them, without pushing yourself to go further, can make the stuff you design quite boring. If a designer makes the text look interesting, it’s going to not only bring the reader back to read it again, but it should also help to “stimulate our sense as well as engaging our intellect.”

This book is worth buying for the Prefaces* and the Introduction. They are very amusing and left me with a small smile on my face:

Satan is the adversary of God. Thus, Satan is typographic evil personified. . . Satan, or the devil as he is often called, was allowed to set up his own design kingdom in Hell and to send out Fallen Angels to prowl the earth for converts to the dark side of typography. The demonic world seems to have been allowed for one purpose only: to tempt humans to turn away from God’s rules. Many believe that Satan can ‘possess’ designers. Possession is bodily invasion by the devil, who forces a designer to break the rules of typographic design.

* The plural in Prefaces is due to there being on in both the Ten Commandments of Typography and the Type Heresy sections.