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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Overview of the 20th Century, September 30, 2005
This review is from: Twentieth-Century Type, New and Revised Edition (Paperback)
This is a great book containing a very good overview of the 20th century changes in typography. It covers everything from pre-art nouveau to postmodernism. A good resource for any design or typography library. My only complaint is that Blackwell waxes a bit too poetic on 1990's postmodernism. Also, they used a tight-fitting Helvetica for the body copy - so reading it takes some effort.
This is certainly worth having in your collection.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for Beginners, May 23, 2010
This book has one chapter for each decade of the 20th century and a collection of fonts at the end of the book. There are a couple of pages on the anatomy of a font, too. Each chapter consists of a chat about the important fonts of the centry and how and why they were developed. The accompanying pictures tend to be of book covers and advertising. There are samples of many of the fonts throughout the book, too.
There is alot of assumed knowlege in this book. I did not understand most of the printing or font terminology and the terms I wondered about tended not to be in the glossary. Perhaps because I did not start off knowing much about the fonts, the information/chat just seemed to be thrown down. There were no specific exmples or illustrations of how fonts that were derived from each other differed from each other.
Arial was not mentioned in the book or the index. How interesting that a book might be intersting because of what is left out of it. A quick check of the net revealed to me that Arial is uncool because it is a Microsoft loyalties-dodge rip of Helvetica. Everyone on the net seems to prefer Helvetica. Well, even before I knew about this controversy (i.e. 10 minutes ago), I MUCH preferred Arial over Helvetica. It was as if every letter was different. Well, it just goes to show the difference a small change can make. Now I recon that Helvetica is way too uptight compared to Arial. So there.
P.S. No cudos for the authors for dodging the Arial/Helvetica issue. I recon it illustrates what an enormous difference a small difference can make to the vibe of a font. Isn't that a cool thing to have illustrated to one?
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for the beginner, May 23, 2010
This review is from: Twentieth-Century Type, New and Revised Edition (Paperback)
This book has one chapter for each decade of the 20th century and a collection of fonts at the end of the book. There are a couple of pages on the anatomy of a font, too. Each chapter consists of a chat about the important fonts of the centry and how and why they were developed. The accompanying pictures tend to be of book covers and advertising. There are samples of many of the fonts throughout the book, too.
There is alot of assumed knowlege in this book. I did not understand most of the printing or font terminology and the terms I wondered about tended not to be in the glossary. Perhaps because I did not start off knowing much about the fonts, the information/chat just seemed to be thrown down. There were no specific exmples or illustrations of how fonts that were derived from each other differed from each other.
Many of the picture captions were run together so it was hard to work out where the caption for a particular picture came from. The book was written in a sans serif font, too. How come professionals are the ones to break the rules? That's a common reason scuba divers drown, but here it's the hapless reader who flunders about.
Arial was not mentioned in the book or the index. How interesting that a book might be intersting because of what is left out of it. A quick check of the net revealed to me that Arial is uncool because it is a Microsoft loyalties-dodge rip of Helvetica. Everyone on the net seems to prefer Helvetica. Well, even before I knew about this controversy (i.e. 10 minutes ago), I MUCH preferred Arial over Helvetica. It was as if every letter was different. Well, it just goes to show the difference a small change can make. Now I recon that Helvetica is way too uptight compared to Arial. So there.
P.S. No cudos for the author for dodging the Arial/Helvetica issue. I recon it illustrates what an enormous difference a small difference can make to the vibe of a font. Isn't that a cool thing to have illustrated to one?
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