3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing and Annoying, September 5, 2004
This review is from: Digital Magazine Design: With Case Studies (Paperback)
When my copy of Digital Magazine Design arrived, I was rather excited. I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, as each page turned my hope gradually turned to disappointment and annoyance. By the time I was finished with the book, I was sorry I had wasted my money on it.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section is written by Honeywill and the second section is written by a number of graduate students. The early chapters of Honeywill's book seemed filled with what is more or less useless material for the designer. While it is perhaps interesting to talk about the icon standards used in modern software programs, there is no real value for the person interested in getting into digital layout. The information seems more geared toward the person who has never saddled up to a keyboard before. For the person who has spent a little time on a computer these chapters are virtually useless.
The following chapters are somewhat useful but a large part of the material is redundant to anyone that has any kind of graphic design training at all. It is very likely that the person picking up this book will have had at least a basic training in typography and graphic design, so when Honeywill states that serif texts are good for body copy, the reader is left thinking, "yeh but tell me something I do not know." To be fair there is useful material in Honeywill's chapters but not enough to where I would be happy about having purchased the book.
The second part of the book is dedicated to several case studies penned by graduate students. When one buys a book about Digital Magazine DESIGN, one would think that the book would be written by experienced designers. One would be wrong in this case. These graduate students are publishing graduate students. Granted, a publisher needs to have some basic graphic design knowledge, but when I buy a book about design, I want to be reading from people who ARE designers. This book would have been better named "Digital Magazine Design for Publishers."
What follows are often tedious and bland critiques of various magazines. We get a detailed description of the typographic choices that each magazine chose. We get very few illustrations of the magazine pages and when we do most of them are on the inner margin and placed to bleed into the binding. This not only makes it hard to really get a feel for the page layout due to size, but the reader is constantly having to flatten out the binding to be able to see the illustrations. In many cases even that does not help. When we are told that a certain design decision did not work well on page x of a magazine, we have no illustration to be able to judge if the writer's opinion is correct or not. When doing graphic design and typography critiques and instruction, illustrations are simply essential. We get far too few illustrations and most of what we do have is of little use due to size and placement on the page.
Another tiring element of the second half of the book is the uninspired writing of most of the essays and their insistence on quoting Honeywill, (i.e. Paul Honeywill says...). We know what Paul Honeywill says because we read it in the first half of the book. These quotes come off more like a grad student name-dropping their teacher in order to hopefully get a better grade, which it seems likely is the case, for these critiques bare the strong marks of theses. Added to that is their insistence on quoting the most basic of typographic and graphic design standards. One can forgive hearing that a serif typeface is best used for body copy once, perhaps twice, but when one hears it 7 times, it starts to get old. Most of the critiques make a point of quoting these most basic of principles. So along about the 3rd or 4th time, the reader begins to get annoyed.
The theses do not give the feeling of real critiques at all. In most cases their purpose seems to be more as a vehicle to show off the (basic) design knowledge of the (non-design) student by parroting their teacher, than to offer any real critique of the magazines.
Typographically the book itself fails as well. This is perhaps the most surprising thing about the book. One would think that a book by a graphic designer would be, well.......designed a little better. I have already mentioned what I feel was a major mistake in placing illustrations on the inside margins. This mistake was compounded by tilting some of the graphics which caused them to bleed further into the binding and making their value as examples to illustrate the text even less.
Another annoying aspect of the graphics lay in the photos that start off each thesis in the second section. At the beginning of each thesis is a photo of the cover of the magazine that is being critiqued. Normally this would be a very good move. Graphic design is a visual art, so having the actual cover of the magazine to view is a smart move. However, Honeywill (or whoever designed his book) chooses to apply a transparency gradient to the covers so that the entire bottom half of the cover is not there. You can only see the top half of the cover! When the cover of a magazine is one of the most important design elements in that magazine, it seems ludicrous to include a photo of the cover, only to knock half of it out with a gradient, just to add white space. Judicial use of white space is called for, but there are times when practical considerations must outweigh the need for more white space. This was definitely one of them.
Additionally the text is flush left and a very ragged right. There is absolutely no hyphenation. The net effect of this is that the raggedness of the columns is so extreme that it jars the reader out of the text at times. As an aside, one would think that a book that tells you several times that serif typefaces are best used for body copy, would have its own body copy in a serif typeface. One would be wrong again. The entire text is set in a sans serif typeface, making reading a bit of a task.
While the reader may get some valuable information out of this book, the amount of repetition, the general uninspired nature of it and the poor typographic choices makes a task out of what should have been a pleasure. Buy at your own risk. I plan to sell mine for anything I can get out of it.
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