Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips

Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type offers perspective, details, and value

Ever since I wrote Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design many years ago, clients and students have been asking me for "the best book about type." There are many of them--many reviewed here--but few stand out from the perspective of both quality and value.

Ellen Lupton's recent Thinking With Type is a winner on both counts. It's a refreshingly simple book, in terms of page layout and presentation of the myriad details involved in setting type. You don't have to "study" this book, you can read it for enjoyment, while learning how to use type effectively in print and on on line.

Best news of all, the book only costs $$19.95 (US). (Princeton University Press, ISBN 1-56898-448-0.

I've spent over $50 on some type books that haven't had one-tenth as much to say as Ellen manages to communicate in just 176 pages of concise, conversational tone, augmented by visuals large enough to be studied. Reading it is like sitting in the audience at one of her presentations, where her passion and enthusiasm for quality typography is communicated to everyone in the audience.

Master the finer points of spacing and arranging type

Although the tools used to set type change, the rules of typographic excellence have been known for centuries. And, although each generation tends to want to "reinvent the wheel," sometimes the most inspirational writing is to be found in books that are considered "typographic classics."

One of my favorites is Geoffrey Dowding's Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type. This slim, elegantly designed and printed volume provides an excellent and highly accessible review of the basics of text alignment and spacing, in a way that drives home information you may have encountered elsewhere, but that failed to make an impression on you.

First appearing in 1966, and now available from Hartley and Marks, the advice and straightforward illustrations in this book will reaffirm your desire to pay attention to the tiniest details of typography, in order to achieve grace and easy reading in everything you produce.

Looking for an easy way to set your publication apart?

Graphic designers interested in creating a fresh new image for a client will appreciate the Mentor and Mentor Sans typeface family now available from fonts.com.

Mentor, a serif font, and Mentor Sans, consists of a full family of typefaces designed to harmonize with each other, yet provide ample opportunities for typographic contrast. A variety of weights are available: Light, Regular, Bold, and Black. True small caps and old style figures accompany the Open Type versions.

An outgrowth of a 1999 book cover project, Michael Harvey, the typeface designer, went back to drawings originally created during the 1960s. In use, Mentor and Mentor Sans project a strong, but very readable, presence on a page.

Because the x-height of the serif and sans versions is the same, Mentor Sans subheads can be used to introduce paragraphs set in in the serif version of Mentor without the need to adjust size, as is typically necessary. Click to learn more about the Mentor family, see it in action, and print out specimen sheets.