During the holidays I picked up some typography books since typography isn’t my strength in design. I prefer to learn from a mixture of books and websites with anything I do.
For coding I have a selection of books I find useful, however when they don’t have the information I need I can look it up on a website I have bookmarked. I find this way much more useful in my learning then just looking it up on google. My main problem with google is trying to sift through the information. Most times I am able to find the information I need however most of the times I can just look it up in a book and save half the time.
I decided to pick up a few books on typography, layout, line and colour to try and strenghten my knowledge in these areas and hopefully to apply it to future projects.
Here are a few books that I picked up:
“The Typographical Experiment: Radical Innovation in contemporary type design” Teal Triggs.
I actually found this book fairly interesting. It shows waht other graphic designers around the world have done with type. Type has always been the bedrock of graphics. Type in other words is the most important thing to consider when designing. Something I have learnt over the last project. Type can be used in so many ways to convey what you would like the user to feel. There are so many things that can be done with type and while it’s one of the most basic things to work with it can be one of the hardest.
I’ve come to the conclusion you could do a masters degree on type, colour, line and form and still have a lot to learn.
“Typographical systems – Rules for organising type” Kimberly Elam
I picked this book last week and found it quite useful. It explains the grids used in type. Much like used in interface design. It’s actually quite a good read and I regret not picking it up earlier in the year. However late is better than never.
“Making and breaking the grid” Timothy Samras
I am waiting for this book in the mail at the moment. I felt that it would be a nice contrast to the typography systems book.
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