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The Manual of Typography

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling introduction to type and good page design

This book appears regularly in the Top Ten list of typography manuals – and rightly so. Although The Manual of Typography began life as one in a series of general introductions to arts and crafts, it has established its reputation on the strength of its scholarship, clarity, and beautiful presentation. McLean covers all the basics. First comes a brief historical survey; then the issues of legibility; practical considerations of paper types and composition methods; book design; and what he modestly calls ‘jobbing typography’. There are notes, a list of material suppliers, a brief index, and an excellent list of further reading. It’s easy to see why this book has become one of the standard texts on its subject.

The design of the book is based on a simple three-column grid, with a subtle rhythm of graphic illustration. This varies from full page blow-ups of a single letter design to marginal examples of icons, logos and glyphs accompanied by explanations of a scholarly density.

Yet despite craft origins, it’s a text which unites a profoundly sophisticated sense of taste with the practical aspects of typography. He ranges from the balance of page layout in art-books, to the nuances of letterspacing in railway timetables. From the analysis of six versions of the same font, to recommendations for clear systems of book illustration captions. It stops short of the computer age – but the range of reference and the elegance of the illustrations make this a must for anyone in visual presentation.

Almost every page of this book is a visual delight. Do yourself a favour. If you want to discover the the delight, the subtlety, and the craft of typographical presentation – this is the place to start. Whilst fashions in grunge and distressed type styles have come and gone in the last ten years, this book has remained in print and become a classic.

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Ruari McLean, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980, pp.280, ISBN 0500680221

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The New Typography

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classic design manifesto of the Modernist movement

Jan Tschichold [pronounced ‘Chick-old’] was a typographist and graphic designer whose life and work straddled two eras. He was born in Leipzig in 1902, and moved to Berlin to be part of the modernist (and left wing) artistic movement which centred round the Bauhaus in the 1920s. There he met and worked with all the important figures of the Modernist movement – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters – whose work in graphic design is used profusely throughout this book. In 1947 he emigrated to the UK and amongst other things designed the re-launch of the Penguin paperback series that became so successful.

Die Neue Typografie was first published in Berlin when Tschichold was only twenty-six years old, yet it represented – as Robin Kinross explains in an elegant and scholarly introduction – “the manifestation in the sphere of printed communication of the modern movement in art, in design … which developed in Central Europe between the two world wars.”

This is the first publication of an English language version. It has been reproduced in a physical form as closely as possible to the original – a square shape, black cover, glossy pages, sans-serif font, and greyscale illustrations with occasional red titles. Very futurist.

Tschichold looks at typography in a historical context, then explores the developments in twentieth century art and the rise of modernism. The principles of the new typography are then explained as a revolutionary movement towards clarity and readability; a rejection of superfluous decoration; and an insistence on the primacy of functionality in design.

There are chapters on the use of photographs; the standardisation of paper sizes [the origin of the DIN A4 we all use today] lots of carefully analysed examples of business stationery, and even film posters which evoke the visual ethos of the inter-war years. All this is illustrated by some crisp and still attractive reproductions of everyday graphics – letterheads, postcards, catalogues, and posters – in the red, black and white colour-scheme characteristic of the period.

Tschichold writes in the vigorous and ‘committed’ manner common to left-wing prose of the time – full of exhortations and generalisations, mainly focussed on the heroes of the New Age:

The engineer shapes our age. Distinguishing marks of his work: economy, precision, use of pure constructional forms that correspond to the functions of the object. Nothing could be more characteristic of our age than these witnesses to the inventive genius of the engineer, whether one-off items such as: airfield, department store, underground railway; or mass-produced objects like: typewriter, electric light-bulb, motor cycle.

Tschichold is also part-responsible for the Modernist ditching of capital letters in favour of all lower-case. Typographic novelty was perhaps sought more vigorously in Germany, because of their continued use of Blackletter or Fraktur (even into the post 1945 period).

The ornate yet corseted ugliness of European typography at the beginning of the twentieth century needed vigorous cleansing and exercise, and functionalist modernism appeared to be the goad and caustic required.

This edition contains not only examples of Tschichold’s revisions to the original text and a multi-language bibliography, but an excellent introduction by the translator Robin Kinross which puts the book in its historical perspective. This is a historic document, a manifesto, a key theoretical document of Central European modernism, and an important reprint. It’s a must-have for anyone with a serious interest in typography or design.

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Jan Tschichold, The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp.236, ISBN: 0520071476

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The Omega Workshops

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury graphic and interior design

The Omega Workshops was a short-lived but influential artists’ co-operative which formed as an offshoot of the Bloomsbury Group. It was the brainchild of Roger Fry who had the philanthropic notion of a self-help scheme for hard-up artists who would create goods of simple but Post-Impressionist modern design. It was partly a reaction against the drabness of mass-produced household goods, but it did not have any of the socialist ideology of William Morris’s earlier Arts and Crafts movement.

It opened in 1913 at the worst possible time in commercial terms, at 33 Fitzroy Square in the heart of Bloomsbury. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry were named as directors, and the premises included both public showrooms as well as artists’ studios. Although the works were produced by people we now see as influential members of the modernist movement, individual productions were made anonymously, signed only with the letter Omega. Artists worked three and a half days a week, for which they were paid thirty shillings. The opening was regarded as nothing short of scandalous. This was a time when popular opinion, fanned by a largely reactionary press, was sceptical to the point of hostility on matters of modern art – especially when it was coupled to something as daring as interior design.

A number of famous names were associated with the workshop: at one time or another Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, William Roberts, and Mark Gertler all had connections with the Omega.

At the launch of the project, artist and writer Wyndham Lewis was also a member; but he quickly split away from the group in a dispute over Omega’s contribution to the Ideal Homes Exhibition. Lewis circulated a letter to all shareholders, making accusations against the company and Roger Fry in particular, and pouring scorn on the products of Omega and its ideology. This subsequently led to his establishing the rival Vorticist movement and the publication in 1916 of its two-issue house magazine, BLAST.

In 1915 Omega started to introduce clothing into the repertoire, inspired by both the costumes of the Ballets Russes and Duncan Grant’s theatre designs. Avid supporters included the flamboyant dresser and socialite Ottoline Morrell as well as the famous bohemian artist (and alcoholic) Nina Hamnet who helped by modelling the clothes.

The war years were difficult for Omega, because many of the principal figures were out of London, working on various agricultural projects as conscientious objectors. Whilst Roger Fry continued to support Omega in London, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Charleston in Sussex, where they put their efforts into decorating the entire house in Omega style – an effort which is now maintained by the National Trust.

Bloomsbury prevailed on all its high society contacts to patronise the workshop, and some commissions for interior house designs were forthcoming from people such as Mary Hutchinson – who was Clive Bell’s mistress. But the reputation of the workshops was not helped by the fact that many of its products were poorly constructed. The biggest commercial success of the Omega was its final closing down sale in 1919, when everything went for half price.

It was a venture which was launched with disastrous timing and foundered on a combination of amateurism and poor management. Yet it established interior design as a legitimate artistic activity, and its influence continued from the 1920s onwards. As Virginia Nicholson in her study Among the Bohemians observes:

Many of the late twentieth-century and contemporary trends are in themselves tributes to the influence of the Charleston artists, to the Diaghilev ballet designers, to the aesthetes, to Omega, and to the members of the Arts and Crafts movement. The modern fashionable interior pays homage to a creative urge amongst a relatively small sub-section of society in the early decades of the twentieth century. So much of what those artists did has been assimilated and re-assimilated, that one should not be surprised that their tastes are yet again being re-cycled for the World of Interiors readership, even if their origins are not always acknowledged.

Omega cabinet – designed by Roger Fry

Omega and After is a beautifully illustrated account of the workshops and their aftermath. It focuses on the three principals – Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant, tracing their artistic production (and their tangled personal relationships) from 1913 to the interwar years. Even when the workshops closed, Grant and Bell continued their interior design work in their decorated house at Charleston. The Omega Workshops had a lasting influence on interior design in the post-war years. This is a rich collection of quite rare pictures, portraits and sketches.
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The Smashing Book

January 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

glamorous illustrated guide to modern web design

The Smashing Book is an offshoot of a web site that offers daily, sometimes twice daily articles on the very latest trends in web design. Some are about graphics and getting the best visual effects; some are tutorials on the latest developments in cascading style sheets; and others are on the golden rules for success as a freelance web designer. In other words, if you want to keep abreast of what’s happening in web design, it’s a site you should have on your favourites list.

Spurred on by the success of the site in the last year or so, the owners have decided to publish a book which encapsulates all their best design principles. I immediately thought it would be a collection of the ‘best of’ articles they have published. But no, it’s more a condensation of their general wisdom – and is much better for that. A chapter on ‘Best Design Features 2009’ would be out of date before the book came into your hands. .

As the authors say ‘The book contains no lists of links or aggregated content. It has ten carefully prepared, written, and edited stories that are based upon topic suggestions and wishes of Smashing Magazine’s readers’. All the links and resources are available online.

The advice is pitched at what I would call intermediate-to-advanced level. It’s aimed at web designers, doesn’t include any coding details, and focuses on notions of good practice. Elegant solutions for common problems are offered on almost every page. The book has also been written by a group of professional designers – so they know what they’re talking about.

The first chapter deals with the subtleties of interface design, then the next does the same thing with style sheets. They cover fundamental topics such as page size, base fonts, interactivity via links, and best screen colours. It reminded me of Yale University’s excellent Web Style Guide which takes a similar approach of concentrating on general design principles.

They cover fixed page width versus fluid pages and even fluid grid layout systems. Some of these techniques (such as ‘text-zooming’) require both a knowledge of CSS and some mathematical calculations to get the proportions right. There’s a rock-solid chapter on typography which goes through all the basic details of presenting text on screen and ends by showing how good typography in page layout can be seen as a form of user interface design.

On usability the point is made again and again that everything should be subordinated to the user’s needs – and these might not be the same as the designer’s preferences. The chapter on colour profits from the book’s high quality production values, and site optimization has plenty of free downloadable software listed to analyse your site and improve its performance.

The later sections on branding and marketing are full of advanced promotional strategies, some of which will cost you money or time – or both. Even blogging or Twittering take time if you hope to develop a regular following.

The last part of the book is in many ways the most fascinating. It’s a forum of specialist web designers answering questions on day-to-day business strategies – how to get started, what they see as the latest developments, what software to use, and favourite approaches to design. I was delighted to read that so many of them recommended the .same content management system I have just chosen for my latest project (WordPress) and speaking as both a designer and a client of agencies, their advice struck me as sound.

Smashing Magazine is an interesting success story in its own right, and I was glad to see that the co-owners included a chapter on its genesis. There was no magic formula for its success. They stuck to design principles in which they believed, expected little, and worked hard. The site succeeded because they delivered high quality content on a regular basis – meaning an essay length illustrated tutorial almost every day.

The only thing they seem to have done wrong is not make their book available via Amazon – but you can order it directly here.

Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman, The Smashing Book, Smashing Media: Lubeck, 2009, pp.311, ISBN: B003CH11BU

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The Struggle for Utopia

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946

This is a series of essays tracing the development of three ground-breaking artists who deliberately harnessed their design skills during the highpoint of modernism to the service of revolutionary social change. The first chapter of The Struggle for Utopia offers an analysis of Alexander Rodchenko‘s designs for public information kiosks, comparing them with El Lissitzky‘s for new forms of paintings and books. This points to the essentially conservative ideology underlying some of Rodchenko’s work, in distinction to El Lissitzky’s attempts to break into new ground. The next deals with the work and theories of the German constructivists – Moholy-Nagy and Lissitzky who had moved to Berlin from the Soviet Union.

There were lots of theoretical wranglings amongst the artists and many bold claims made for the social and even revolutionary meanings in their works. Nevertheless, a simple connection between artist’s belief or intention and its manifestation on canvas or print remains as illusive as ever it will be. And if these abstract paintings dropped out of the sky unsigned, their meanings would be even more intractable.

This is followed by a chapter on Rodchenko’s work between 1922 and1927 when he gave all his creative energy to the cause of ‘production art’ – the design of socially useful objects such as furniture, books, magazines, exhibitions, and advertising posters. His furniture was never put into production [through no fault of his own] but his graphic design was a big success, was hugely influential, and is still fresh as paint today.

Next comes a comparison of the pioneering work in photography done by Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. Then Margolin tackles the difficult task of trying to find positive things to say about the work Rodchenko and Lissitzky produced as propagandists during the black years of the Stalin period. He does his best, but it’s difficult to take seriously the pictures of smiling ethnic minorites and the construction of the White Sea Canal when we now know the brutal truth of what was going on.

Rodchenko amazingly survived until 1956, though he produced nothing more worthy of note. Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago where he influenced a whole generation of product desgners in his new Bauhaus Institute of Design.

This is a scholarly work with a full apparatus of citations, references and footnotes. It’s also beautifully designed, illustrated, and printed – as befits the subject matter. My only carp is that I wish a list of further reading had been extracted from the dense thicket of footnotes which cluster at the bottom of almost every page of the book. I want to read more: make it easy for me to follow up.

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Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917—1946, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp.259, ISBN: 0226505162

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The Visual Display of Information

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

The Visual Display of Information is the earliest of the three books on information design which Edward Tufte has written, designed, and published himself. In it he develops his theory of “a language for discussing graphics and a practical theory of data graphics” The first chapter plots the rise of data maps, which he claims didn’t really develop properly until the late seventeenth century, and then took off in the nineteenth – from which he gives some very elegantly illustrated examples. The centrepiece of this section is Charles Joseph Minard’s time chart of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. This shows in a really interesting manner the devastating reduction in the size of the army plotted again geographic location and ambient temparature. It is a fascinating mixure of three levels of information rendered as a graphical image.

Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data – a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.

I was surprised to find how his writing is even more compacted and elliptical than in a book such as Visual Explanations written nearly twenty years later. Here he writes of a map “achieving statistical graphicacy, even approaching the bivariate scatterplot”. You’ve got to be prepared to hack your way through a lot of this sort of thing.

In a discussion of the integrity of graphical data and statistics that lie he gives examples from Britain’s national debt during the war of American Independence – which show graphs going up whilst the truth goes down. This is very convincing – though I couldn’t easily get used to his habit of referring to ‘data’ in the plural.

He has the interesting notion that ‘data-ink’ ought to be minimised. In other words, any information will stand out more clearly the less printing is done to present it.: “The number of information-carrying dimensions depicted should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data”. You’ve got to be prepared to leap from traffic deaths and government expenditure to the properties of chemical elements, and be prepared for lots of detail on the difference between boxplots, bar charts, histograms, and scatterplots.

He’s basically in favour of simplifying representation – reducing what he calls ‘chart-junk’. That is, anything which does not contribute to revealing information. Yet there remain strange contradictions. One of his edicts (which seems sensible) is that “Graphics can be shrunk way down – Many data graphics can be reduced in area to half their currently published size with virtually no loss in legibility and information.” Yet he often presents examples of bad (but visually attractive) graphics across double page spreads. And he’s not bashful. When it comes to naming one of his own designs (a list of voting patterns in the 1980 US elections) it becomes not a mere list but a ‘SUPERtable’.

But this is a stimulating and attractive production. I was surprised that there wasn’t a formal bibliography, but he chooses to foreground his references directly into the generous page margins as a design feature. He developed a graphic style for this book which he has stuck to ever since. The basic formula is beautiful illustrations, some occupying a whole page, with the relevant text condensed in a crisp and economic style. No topic exceeds a double page spread, and the book is produced from very high quality paper, printed like a work of art, and bound as if it were a rare first edition.

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Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997, pp.156, ISBN: 0961392126

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Thinking with Type

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical guide for designers, writers, editors, students

Ellen Lupton’s new design guide is in three parts. The first of Thinking with Type deals with the range, choice, and nature of the typeface you can use; the second shows how it can be squeezed, adjusted, and re-arranged for effect; and the third deals with the underlying structures upon which good page design is built. Actually, there’s a fourth as well – an appendix offering a list of hints on editing and punctuation, plus a comprehensive bibliography.

Each part is accompanied by an essay explaining key concepts, and then a set of practical demonstrations illustrating that material. Part One delivers an excellent tutorial in the history and analysis of moveable type – from its origins in the Renaissance printing houses through to the designs for digital type which have arisen in the last twenty years. She writes in a light, rapid, and elegant style which packs a lot into a small space. What she has to say has obviously been distilled through many years teaching the subject.

Letters gather into words, words build into sentences. In typography ‘text’ is defined as an ongoing sequence of words, distinct from shorter headlines or captions. The main text is often called the ‘body’, comprising the principal mass of content. Also known as ‘running text’, it can flow from one page, column, or box to another. Text can be viewed as a thing—a sound and sturdy object—or a fluid poured into the containers of page or screen. Text can be solid or liquid, body or blood.

Part Two enters the semi-philosophic realm of the relationships between text and space. Here she explains how layout is used as an aid to comprehension, navigation, and structure. She also extends this discussion to include hypertext and human interface design.

This is followed by solidly reliable advice on the basic techniques of type kerning, line spacing, text alignment, and creating structure and hierarchies of significance in a text by spatial placement and visual emphasis.

Part Three deals with grids – the hidden systems for arranging content within the space of a page or a screen. In fact grids are shown in use in the presentation of information in a variety of media magazines and books, catalogues and newspapers, and she even quotes Edward Tufte’s example of railway timetables.

The book itself is beautifully designed and produced. Each topic is covered in a single or double page spread; marginal notes point to the sources of quotations and suggestions for background reading; and almost every other page includes a colour graphic illustrating the issue in question.

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Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type: A critical guide for designers, editors, and students, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, pp.176, ISBN: 1568984480

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Understanding Comics

July 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the techniques, philosophy, and interpretation of comics

Whenever there is a discussion or an exchange of messages concerning comics or visual narratives, one name crops up again and again – Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics is his now classic work on the comic designer’s art. It’s presented in the form of a comic itself – but don’t let that fool you. He could just as easily given his book the sub-title ‘The Philosophy of Graphic Narratives’. He starts with a chapter defining what comics are (sequential visual art) and shows something of their history, going back as far as Egyptian wall paintings in 1300 BC.

If at first this seems rather obvious or over-simplified, two or three pages into chapter two, he is discussing the theory of visual perception and the nature of iconic language. Next comes the sequencing of action and the decision of what goes into (and what can be left out of) each visual panel of a comic. There’s a very interesting comparison of American and Japanese techniques in which he argues that some of the special effects of the Manga comics arise from different traditions of perception in the East.

He explains the depiction of time and motion via the panel or frame. In fact after doing the same thing for emotion by the use of symbols, he extends his argument to claim that we are in an age where a whole new visual language is in the process of being invented.

The traditional modes of dealing with narrative via showing and telling are demonstrated by the same story being related via pictures and words, then re-combined to show the comic creator’s skill in offsetting one medium against the other to avoid tautology and maximise expressive density.

This is a book which will entrance any comic lovers or anybody who has an interest in media studies or how ideas and stories are transmitted.

Quite a lot of these issues of graphics, narrative, point of view, and are now an active part of online, web-based information. I’m sure he will be aware of that, and I’m sure he will take it into account in any future editions.

He ends with what is obviously a heartfelt plea that comics should be taken seriously as a cultural genre, and he extends this to claim that they haven’t yet even scratched the surface of what they are capable of expressing.

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Scott McCLoud, Understanding Comics, New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp.217, ISBN 006097625X

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Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

This has become one of the cornerstone’s of feminist theory in relation to literature. It’s a sparkling, critical, and wide-ranging expose of male privilege and the way in which women have been excluded from cultural life. However, as John Willis argues in his study of the text, Woolf omitted to mention the work of other women writers on the same subject which had appeared prior to her own.

“There was more fiction than fact in Woolf’s most famous and beloved feminist polemic. The occasion was an address to the young women of Newham and Girton colleges on the subject of women and fiction, which she subsequently rewrote into the expanded form of the published book. Woolf’s form followed function. She created clever and pointed fictions before their eyes, inventing, among others, Shakespeare’s thwarted sister Judith and the young modern novelist Mary Carmichael. There were few facts partly because she presumed to dislike them and partly because the works on women containing the facts (all erroneous) had been written by men. Woolf chose not to recognise the existence of useful, accurate, and understanding accounts of women by women. Nor did she mention directly the achievements of women such as [Millicent Garrett] Fawcett, [Ray] Strachey, or [Margaret Llewellyn] Davis. Strachey’s The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s movement in Great Britain (1928) was a year old when Woolf created her story of her own room and an inheritance of £500 per year, yet there is only a brief quotation from it, identified in a footnote. Facts aside, the wit and irony of her writing, her satirical exposure of patriarchal attitudes, her leaps of intuitive understanding, [and] her subjective experience made the book memorable and influential.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

The first one hundred copies of [the first, limited edition] were for sale by the Hogarth Press, and the price was substantial. The Hogarth Press’s trade edition, issued at the same time, was priced at 5s; the print run was 3,040 copies. The press published a number of books that come at the same question of women’s lives and positions in different ways. One of particular interest is Life As We Have Known It (1931), a collection of autobiographical sketches of guildswomen, for which Woolf wrote an introductory letter.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Virginia Woolf – Between the Acts

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1939) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Leonard Woolf decided after Virginia’s death to publish Between the Acts as she had written it, editing only for spelling and minor textual errors. John Lehmann supported him completely in this decision. The critical success and popularity of the book give evidence that Virginia had found her way into a new fusion of form and vision after The Years. After her death, Leonard carefully planned for the future, husbanding her stories, essays, and letters for judiciously timed collections. Over the next seventeen years, through 1958, Leonard published eight posthumous collections of Virginia’s writing, releasing a volume every two or three years on a schedule that approximated her production when alive. In this way Leonard kept Virginia’s name before the public and assisted in her growing critical acclaim. Even in death, Virginia Woolf remained the most productive and profitable of the Hogarth Press writers.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Hogarth Press studies

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best-selling introduction to type and good page design

classic design manifesto of the Modernist movement

Bloomsbury graphic and interior design

glamorous illustrated guide to modern web design

Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

critical guide for designers, writers, editors, students

the techniques, philosophy, and interpretation of comics

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

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