As a community college student studying media and graphic design, the problem with the required class textbooks is that I find them very bland and drawn-out. They often dive right into the history of it all, typically using popular pieces of art from another era to exemplify what the chapter is trying to say. As a result, those books lose me very quickly because they're boring as heck and we are not usually tested on these things anyway. Which is a big problem right there. But if I do manage to make it through a few chapters, I rarely walk away being able to recall what I just read.
It's hard to absorb material that consist of many daunting paragraphs that either beat around the bush or throw terms with definitions at me left and right. It also doesn't help when the pages are usually littered with distracting graphics and colors to try and give it style, which I find to be ironically counterproductive. And if the school curriculum itself doesn't help put the fundamental principals into practice with every assignment, it's like trying to sprint before you can properly walk.
Now at the near-end of my program, I really wish I would've came across this book when I started out. It has helped my confidence in a way that reading endless amounts of articles and watching TED Talks could not. I keep wrestling with this idea that, despite my good grades and everything I have learned, I would never feel like I could produce something that I would actually consider a pretty good design. I would open a new document and never know where to begin. At first I thought it was because I wasn't creative, then I thought I was just a demotivated person in general, then I started to think my college curriculum was the biggest issue (too much emphasis on students knocking out assignments instead of learning), which for me resulted in a lot of trial and error to make a good design. Sometimes I lucked out and sometimes it was meh. All this doing and not enough knowing was starting to make me doubt this career path. It wasn't until I cracked opened this book and realized the big problem, I needed to go back to basics.
It's straight-forward, uses very clear examples, and covers many topics; much of it pertaining to making print materials. Although a couple of things that weren't covered were grids and logos, I can make up for these in another hard-to-read textbook I have. It doesn't go super in-depth since this is meant more for beginners, but it still touches on each thing with a great amount of information so the reader understands each topic very well, all while using a plain layout for its information. After getting through this, I can highly suggest the book to anyone not feeling that great about their abilities if they're still fairly new to learning graphic design. Only people I probably wouldn't recommend this for are those at university or people disciplined enough to teach themselves, as this book may be nothing new to them. For me, this book has retaught me a lot of what I should already know by now, but embarrassed to say that I really didn't. Even though I have obviously studied these principles in order to get to this point, nothing I have read/watched/heard have really explained in plain English on how to put these things into practice. And that not knowing was the thing holding me back. I now have good reference material for whenever I start self-doubting.
Robin Williams has made learning graphic design quite easier than I have been perceiving the subject this whole time, all in this one quick read. I now feel more ready to go back to the heavier material on these subjects, and actually memorize it all. Also, I'm only now realizing the hardest part over the years was learning Adobe's three main pieces of software and using them to their full potential, which seems like an endless journey in itself. It's almost aggravating realizing that I retained probably more from this book in one day, than the hundreds of dollars worth of college textbooks that mostly sat in my backpack each semester.
Now I'm not saying this book will surely make you a pro after reading it all. I am saying that many people, like me, do much better when the material is explained as simply as possible, with effective visuals in a non-intimidating format. If you need something concise that starts from the beginning principles, and expands on them to make you more comfortable in creating professional looking layouts, I think this is the best option.
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