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design history, graphic design, information design, product design

design history, graphic design, information design, product design

design history, graphic design, information design, product design

Designing Interfaces

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

navigation, interactivity, and graphic design techniques

O’Reilly have recently taken to adding colour to their publications – and it works. The pages are more visually interesting, and the reader gets a more accurate picture of what will appear on screen. This book is attempting to get down to the fundamentals of interface design – How many clicks, how many screens do you need to see before you get to what you want? In fact Jenifer Tidwell starts of with usability issues, showing what real users do and ask of interfaces. Then she starts considering design, starting from the top and most general level – the organisation of content, or information architecture. This also includes consideration of the user interface or screen.

Designing InterfacesThe main strength of her approach is that she is very thorough. Her examples include different types of software and hardware. A design that works on a computer screen will have to be adapted if it’s going to be read on a mobile phone, and if viewed on a TV screen, you won’t have a mouse for navigation. She deals with web pages, installation programs, spreadsheets, and even graphic design packages – but keeps these issues in mind at all times.

Next comes navigation which deals with methods for leading the user through the contents. These include navigation panels, sequence maps, breadcrumb trails, and colour coding.

The next level down in terms of detail is page layout. This introduces elements of graphic design in arranging both content and navigation. This where the going can get rough. The layout part is easy if you’ve got a reasonable eye for design, but after that you need to choose between columns and tabs, and fixed width and liquid pages. She explains all the options, with the advantages and drawbacks of each.

Then comes what she calls the ‘verbs’ of the interface – objects such as buttons, action panels, and menus which make things happen. I was pleased to see that she gave as an example of bad design just how difficult it is to cancel a print job in Windows.

It’s fairly obvious that her principal interest is in information graphics – maps, tables, and graphs plus all their variants. Here she covers the ground which Edward Tufte has made his own – but you’ll find her prose easier to understand. She covers tooltips, expandable views, and what she calls ‘data brushing’ whereby the user can select which part(s) of a collection of information to view on screen.

Then comes a section on the much trickier issue of designing interactive choice lists. There are all sorts of possibilities here – forms, checkboxes, toggle buttons, dropdown lists, and so on – but the important point is that she illustrates them all, pointing to their advantages and weaknesses.

She even covers the design of interfaces for editors – such as text and image editing programs. Not many people outside a technological elite few will need to know these matters, but I found it instructive to see the general principles behind so many of the drag and drop or click and resize functions we come across all the time.

She finishes with a chapter any designer will enjoy – dealing with the graphic design of what appears on screen. This involves colour, spacing, typography, balance, and every other facet of visual rhetoric to make a visitor wish to stay on the site. I picked up some useful tips on hairlines and rounded corners here.

It’s a handsome, well-designed book – as befits its subject – and she includes a generous bibliography. O’Reilly have done her proud.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Designing Interfaces   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jenifer Tidwell, Designing Interfaces, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.331, ISBN: 0596008031


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Information Design Tagged With: Computers, Designing Interfaces, Graphic design, Information design, Navigation, Web design

Designing the 21st Century

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

contemporary world product design and designers

This is a block-busting compendium of design and designers which is as smack up to date as it’s possible to be. It’s arranged in alphabetical order, allocating individual or group designers a few pages each to demonstrate work produced in the current century. The designers are each given a short profile and a list of exhibitions and clients, plus well-photographed examples of their work. They are also asked to respond to the question “What is your vision for the future of design?” The materials are those of everyday products – chairs, lighting, shelving, cutlery, computers (the Mac, naturally) motor cars, mobile phones, kettles, and settees.

Designing the 21st CenturyDesigners run from Werner Aisslinger and Ron Arad via the amazing Jonathan Ive, through to Helen Yardley and Michael Young. I was surprised by two things: how many of these designers had all come up with basically the same coffee table; and how many of the best designers were British.

Charlotte and Peter Fiell are a two-person encyclopedia of modern design, with a string of publications on the subject. If this doorstep size tome is not for you, try their pocket-book sized Design of the 20th Century and Industrial Design A—Z, both of which are short introductions to the same subject.

This is a visually rich collection which is doing its best to look ahead to what might happen next. Like most of Taschen’s other publications it’s well designed, well printed and produced, and amazingly good value.

It’s a pity the individual designer’s contact details are not given, but anyone with an interest could click on Google and track people down with a search word or two.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Designing the 21st Century   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Charlotte and Peter Fiell , Designing the 21st Century, London: Taschen, 2005, pp.576, ISBN: 3822858838


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Designing Web Navigation

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

optimising the user experience

Anyone who has ever designed a web site will know that navigation of its contents is a key issue in the site’s usability. Visitors must be able to find their way around – otherwise they’ll leave, and they won’t come back again. Successful navigation systems require good screen design, well thought out information architecture, clear labelling, logical hierarchies, and effective linking. This book deals with all these issues of designing web navigation in an extremely thorough manner.

Designing Web NavigationEvery aspect of navigational design is examined in close detail – through both theoretical models and technical research, and a practical examination of a wide variety of large scale web sites from around the world. It’s a beautifully presented book, with elegantly designed pages, full colour illustrations, and scholarly yet unobtrusive footnotes leading to web references and recommendations for further reading.

The chapters are almost exhaustively thorough. On navigation mechanisms for instance, he covers every possibility – from tabs to breadcrumb trails, and from dropdown menus to sitemaps, tag clouds, A to Z indexes, and star trees. You couldn’t wish for anything more comprehensive. He discusses the advantages and the potential disadvantages of each system, showing examples of where they are used to good effect.

Although it is primarily concerned with the delivery of content over the Web and read in browsers on a computer, he also discusses the navigational consequences of content delivery via mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and even car navigation systems.

On the issue of designing a navigation system he has a very sound piece of advice. “Don’t start by designing the navigation on the home page.” This might seem counter-intuitive, because for most designers the home page is the focus of their attention, and it’s the root, the index page of the entire site. But it’s not the most important page for visitors. Most of them will enter via a page deep within the site to which they have been referred by a link from a search engine.

Although there’s quite a lot on extensive usability testing, in general he strikes a reasonable balance between writing for professional designers of large scale corporate and ecommerce sites, and smaller sites which might be the work of an individual entrepreneur. There are certainly plenty of tips on the presentation of text on a page for instance which could help improve the work of an enthusiastic amateur.

He ends by discussing the relationship between navigation and searching, social tagging systems, and rich web applications. These latter post a new challenge to designers, because web pages are no longer static entities which appear in the order they are summoned via mouse clicks. Rich web applications can compose the content of a web page dynamically. Once the user has chosen a new set of data on screen, there is nowhere to go back to. The page URL remains the same, even though what is being displayed has changed. Fortunately, he provides ample guidance to designers on how to cope with such new problems.

I think this is a book which aspires to position itself alongside Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Jakob Nielsen’s Homepage Usability as modern classics of web design principles.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Designing Web Navigation   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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James Kalbach, Designing Web Navigation, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.394, ISBN: 0596528108


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Filed Under: Information Design, Web design Tagged With: Communication, Design, Designing Web Navigation, Information design, Web design

Designing Web-Based Training

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

web-based course construction – from start to finish

This is a well-illustrated guide to every phase of designing, setting-up, and managing a Web-based training site. It goes from graphics and content design, to finding students and assessing their needs; from hardware and software options, to usability testing. William Horton explains what Web Based Training (WBT) can do and how to get the best results from exploiting its technologies. And for ‘training’ you can also read ‘education’ – because as he argues, the distinction between the two is often negligible. His approach is practical and clear; the book is written in a no-nonsense manner; and he follows his own prescriptions by giving examples to illustrate every point he makes.

Designing Web-Based TrainingThe design of the book itself more or less imitates Web pages: there are lots of headings, subheadings, quick paragraphs, tabled checklists, call-out boxes, horizontal rules, screenshots, and bulleted lists. He is essentially gung-ho for WBT as a novel learning technology – but he does look at a lot of research evidence, both pro and contra. He discusses the tricky issues of how to put a cost on course construction, how to devise navigational metaphors, and how to deal with potential plagiarism.

He offers several explanations of how to organise the sequence of learning events (or ‘objects’) in a course of learning. Then he even demonstrates the design of an entire course in outline, with templates of all the important pages and the structure in which they are arranged. This is valuable material for anyone who might be coming to the writing of online learning materials for the first time.

He covers an amazing variety of approaches to teaching – including the use of Webcasts, presentations, guided research, case studies, and learning games. There are some particularly good examples of virtual laboratories for teaching mechanical engineering and HTML coding. Most importantly perhaps, he shows which approaches are best used for which type of problem or task.

There’s a good section on tests and exercises, including advice on setting true/false and multiple-choice questions, and when it’s best to use matching pair and drag and drop questions. A section on teaching by email and discussion groups contains all the usual advice about Netiquette which many people still ignore.

The book is aimed at professional designers, trainers, and teachers – but it’s written in a way which will make it useful at any level. I bought my copy to solve some design problems for one group of students – which it has done in no time at all. Now my business partner has grabbed it to do the same for another group.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Designing Web-Based Training   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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William K. Horton, Designing Web-Based Training : How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, pp.640, ISBN: 047135614X


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Filed Under: Information Design, Online Learning Tagged With: Designing Web-Based Training, eLearning, Information design, Online learning, Training, Writing skills

Device: Art, Commercial

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

portfolio of contemporary graphic design

Rian Hughes is a designer who has captured very accurately a retro look of the 50s and 60s – flat colours, comic-book style, cocktail glasses, kidney-shaped ‘contemporary’ coffee tables, abstract design wallpaper. He has also been influenced by Japanese Pokemon design and more than a little by the British typographist Neville Brody. This collection of his work Device: Art, Commercial is from Die Gestalten Verlag – high quality design, print, paper, and production.

Device: Art, CommercialHughes’ designs are for exhibition and travel posters, CD covers, comics, magazines, product advertising, font sets, dingbats, and book jackets. There are strong affinities with the French style of bandes dessinées, and some of the more intriguing examples here are visual narratives – stories told in a series of pictures without words.

There’s an amazing variety of material here – greetings cards, packaging, carrier bags, graphic novels, logos, stationery – though he seems at his strongest to me in his designs for adult comics and font sets. Every page is a treat in terms of colour and composition – and I’m sure this compilation will be a rich source of visual stimulation for graphic designers in all fields.

He also does a nice line in parodies. Dare is a satirically downbeat ‘controversial memoirs’ of Dan Dare from the Eagle comic, and TumTum and the Forged Expenses is a wonderful take-off of Tintin.

As a nice bonus, Device comes with a CD-Rom featuring a mini-Flash presentation, through which you can access free fonts and desktop wallpaper, and watch a selection of animated commercials and presentations, all designed by Hughes.

This is a very handsome production – except the supporting text is set at six points and printed on mid-grey paper. You’ll need a magnifying glass if you want to read any of the details.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Device: Art, Commercial   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Rian Hughes, Device: Art, Commercial, Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2002, pp.288, ISBN: 3931126862


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Filed Under: Graphic design Tagged With: Art, Commercial, Device: Art, Graphic design

Dictionary of Graphic Design

July 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated encyclopedia of all matters related to design

This is a comprehensive guide to international developments in graphic design. From pre-industrial printing presses and medieval typography to computer graphics and avant-garde stylistic advances. The Dictionary of Graphic Design provides information about graphic designers, typographers, journals, movements and styles, organisations and schools, printers and private presses, art directors, technological advances, design studios, graphic illustrators, and poster artists. The entries are in alphabetical order ranging from the ABC system of standard paper sizes via Mackintosh and John Maeda to typographists Hermann Zapf and Piet Zwart.

Dictionary of Graphic DesignEntries are cross-referenced, and there’s also a chronological chart which outlines the relationship between movements, technology and designers around the world.This second edition has been completely revised, updated, and completely redesigned by Derek Birdsall. It includes 485 wonderfully varied illustrations which give a stunning visual record. It’s a shame they are mainly in black and white, but in such a bargain-price book I don’t suppose we can have everything.

They cover a wide range of media, including advertising, corporate identity, posters, packaging, magazine and book design, as well as fine art and illustration.

It’s very well informed and clearly based on in-depth knowledge of the subject. The authors cover all aspects of graphic design from 1840 to the present day – from William Morris, inspired by nature, and El Lissitzky’s Constructivist design, to the Designer Republic’s visuals for the music and club scene and John Maeda’s computer graphics.

There’s an illustration of almost every individual designer mentioned, and they are particularly generous towards younger contemporaries such as Mark Farrow and Peter Saville, whose work has been in CD and LP record cover design industry.

I checked out their entries on popular designers such as Neville Brody, David Carson, and Paul Rand, and all of them were spot on. The collection also introduced me to many designers whose work I recognised but who I had never heard of before.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Dictionary of Graphic Design   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Dictionary of Graphic Design   Buy the book at Amazon US


Alan and Isabella Livingston, Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, pp.239, ISBN: 0500203539


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Dictionary of Modern Design

July 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

design, designers, products, movements, influences

This Dictionary of Modern Design is a serious textual resource on design matters, written by somebody who is quite clearly steeped in his subject. Jonathan Woodham is Professor of the History of Design at the University of Brighton, and this compendium has all the hallmarks of being a summation of a lifetime’s work. It’s an A to Z compendium of entries which run from architects and designers Alvar and Aino Aalto, through to typographer and book designer Hermann Zapf. It covers the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth.

Dictionary of Modern Design There are over 2,000 entries on names and movements from the past 150 years of design. The only weakness is that there are hardly any illustrations – something they might rectify in a second edition. Individual entries are a mixture of individual designers – Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, and Jan Tschichold, plus movements such as Bauhaus, Omega workshops, and Wiener Werkstatte, to specific products such as The Dyson vacuum cleaner, Levi Strauss jeans, and the bathroom fittings suppliers Villeroy and Boch.

There are also entries on materials (polypropylene) places (Museum of Modern Art) events (Festival of Britain) institutions (the Design Institute) and even individual products such as Barby, the wonder doll, plus entries on companies (Habitat, IKEA) product strategies (flatpacks) materials (Formica) typographists (Eric Gill) and even shops (Biba and Healds).

Individual entries are punctuated by occasional pull-out boxes which define movements and general terms – such as art deco, constructivism, kitsch, neo-modernism, and streamlining. The entries are presented in a plain and uncluttered prose style, with cross references to related items:

Lissitsky, El (Lazar Markovich Lissitsky 1890—1941) The Russian *Constructivist typographer, graphic designer, architect, painter, photographer and theorist El Lissitsky was influential in the dissemination of *Modernism both through his work and his theoretical writings. He studied architecture and engineering under Joseph Maria *Olbrich and others at the Technical School at Darmstadt between 1909 and 1914, visiting Paris, the hub of avant-garde artistic activity, in 1911. He moved back to Russia to practise architecture in 1914, but also worked in the fine arts and illustration, underlining notions of his concept of the ‘artist-engineer’…
[and so on]

It’s a shame there aren’t more illustrations, but there’s a huge bibliography which reflects the scholarly provenance, a timeline which puts design events from 1840 to the present into a social and political context, and a comprehensive bibliography.

© Roy Johnson 2006

Dictionary of Modern Design   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jonathan M. Woodham, A Dictionary of Modern Design, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.544, ISBN: 0192806394


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Filed Under: Design history, Dictionaries, Graphic design, Product design Tagged With: Design, Dictionaries, Dictionary of Modern Design, Graphic design, Product design, Reference

dot-font: talking about design

August 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays on design, typography, and bibliography

John Berry is the former editor and publisher of U&lc (Upper and lower case) the prestigious and influential typographical journal, and he has won awards for his book designs. (Lowercase) dot-font is a collection of short articles on graphic design he wrote for the portal web site Creativepro.com. I first came across this book when it was announced that, in common with many other authors in the digital age, John Berry was giving the book away free of charge as a PDF download. Why not re-cycle your own work and give it away free? This was the new economics

dot-font: talking about design I grabbed a copy, saw it was an attractive production, and immediately ordered a printed version from Amazon. By the time I had finished reading the first few chapters, I also ordered its sister production dot-font: Talking About Fonts. The original articles were basically his responses to exhibitions, lectures, and presentations he had attended. It sometimes feels a little odd to be reading about an event that took place some years ago and cannot be recalled. But his analyses and observations are those of a seasoned practitioner, and they retain their original value. Similarly, the formula of reproducing web essays as a printed book is quite successful. The original pages contained web links: those are missing here, but the structure remains, as well as illustrative graphics in the form of marginal thumbnails.

We get a lively introductions to design theorist Rick Poyner, then French book designer Massin, and a comparison of the signage in the underground rail systems of New York, Paris, and London.

There are a couple of chapters on the design and typography of American government ballot papers. These are offered as examples of bad design which have led to several disputed elections. So design really does have very practical consequences in the real world.

The central section of this collection comprises three chapters on book design and typography – from the shape and layout of the printed page, through the many choices that confront designers for presenting body text, even through to such details as the manner in which titles can appear on the spine of a book.

It’s a beautifully designed and illustrated production in its own right. The text is set in MVB Verdigris, the display in HTF Whitney, and there are generous page margins. Yet it’s not just a glamorous design portfolio: John Berry digs into some fundamental issues of design theory. It’s a book that is pleasing to the eye – but also one that will make you think.

dot-font design   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


John D. Berry, dot-font: talking about design, New York: Mark Batty Publishers, 2006, pp.128, ISBN: 0977282716


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Typography Tagged With: Design, Graphic design, Publishing, Talking About Design, Typography

dot-font: talking about fonts

July 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays on fonts, typography, and design

John Berry is the former editor and publisher of U&lc (Upper and lower case) the prestigious and influential typographical journal, and he has won awards for his book designs. This is a collection of short articles on fonts and typographic design he wrote for the portal website Creativepro.com. I first came across this book when it was announced that, in common with many other authors in the digital age, John Berry was giving the book away free of charge as a PDF download. I grabbed a copy, saw it was an attractive production, and immediately ordered a copy in print. By the time I had finished reading the first few chapters, I also ordered its sister production dot-font: talking about design.

dot-font: talking about fontsThe articles range widely across issues of typography and the design of fonts – starting with an interesting historical note on the short-lived era of typography using Letraset (remember that?) . He goes on to the pleasures of old type specimen books; a review of an exhibition catalogue featuring Sumner Stone’s designs for a ‘classical’ sans-serif font (Basalt); and an appreciation of the Dutch Type Library in Hertogenbosch.

Some of the essays are in-depth studies of a single typeface – Matthew Carter’s Monticello and Herman Zapfs Optima for instance. In both cases he comments on the changes made when translating these designs into digital type, a process which generally seems to increase enormously the number of weights and sizes at which they become available.

He is quite insistent that any true typeface worthy of a distinguished name must include the full range of variants, accidentals, and special characters:

An old-style text face, based on types that were first cut and used in books in the 15th to 18th centuries, should be accompanied by old-style figures, by a complete set of f-ligatures, and by true small caps. It ought to have a set of real fractions too, or the numerators and denominators to create them. Without these, it looks as unconvincing as a callow Hollywood actor pretending to be a Shakespearean prince.

It’s a beautifully designed and illustrated production in its own right. The text is set in MVB Verdigris, the display in HTF Witney, and there are generous page margins. Yet it’s not just a glamorous design portfolio: John Berry digs into some some funamental issues of typographic theory and the use of fonts, such as the question of where the originality in reviving old typefaces ends and copying begins. It’s a book that is pleasing to the eye – but also one that will make you think.

dot-font fonts   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


John D. Berry, dot-font: talking about fonts, New York: Mark Batty Publishing, 2006, pp.126, ISBN: 0977282708


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Typography Tagged With: Design, Fonts, Graphic design, Typography

DSOS1: Designer Shock

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

avant-garde downloadable fonts and design styles

Here’s an unusual idea – a book which is an introduction to a web site. Well, not exactly – because there’s more to it than that. The print version shows you what’s on offer, but the site allows you interactive connection with the software. This is what used to be called in the world of rock music, a ‘concept albumn’. Still confused? Read on. DesignerShock is a German-based collective of graphic design artists. They’ve come up with the idea of making design software available online.

Designer Shock This comes in the form of downloadable fonts, screensavers, wallpaper, product packaging, undsoweiter. You’re with it so far? But they also offer an additional element. You buy the book – which illustrates their designs – and it comes with a CD which gives you access to their web site. So, you have access to unlimited free use. You can download then change, stretch, and adapt the basic information to suit your own taste, using morphing software.

But the problem is that the book is quite hard to read. It’s difficult to know what is main text matter and what is extraneous page decoration and book navigation details. Sometimes the book’s own system of presenting graphics seems to overwhelm its contents.

The examples they show are almost all avant-garde – that is, nearly unreadable. You’ve got to have a strong stomach to even take them seriously. There is one set of fonts in which the letters H and W are identical.

There are also examples of product package designs, icons, dingbats, and did I mention? – the book also doubles as a mousemat. It’s all wacky – but there is the germ of a good idea in here.

© Roy Johnson 2001

DSOS1: Designer Shock   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Stefan Gandl, Alexander Dewhirst, Designershock, DSOS1 DesignerShock, Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2001, pp.180, ISBN: 3931126641


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Typography Tagged With: DSOS1: Designer Shock, Fonts, Graphic design, Typography

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