While you're reading
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WHILE YOU'RE READING -- in front of your eyes and inside your head -- and about what type designers, typographers and graphic designers bring to a page to make reading happen.
Why do I love this book?
Thanks to Gerard Unger we get another look at the way people behave -- and it's this understanding of human behavior that arms the graphic designer with the tools necessary to conceive, produce and deliver compelling messages. This book ranks high on the list of must-read books for anyone who deals with developing printed texts for readers -- in fact I'll go so far as to demand that all visual communicators read While you're reading along with Colin Wheildon's monumental book "Type & Layout."
Renowned type designer Gerard Unger distills decades of design experience into a playful, accessible text that reflects the range of his professional projects, from designing the fonts read daily by millions in USA Today to being responsible for the look of the highway and metro signs in the Netherlands.
For Unger, regardless of the application, designers should always consider two important questions: How is it possible to read without seeing any letters? To what extent do all readers possess hidden typographic knowledge? Keeping these two core ideas in mind, Unger explores such topics as legibility, invisible typography, pattern recognition, the reading process, the ergonomics of letterforms, the universe of signs, negative space and typographic illusions.
While most seasoned typographers and designers will find this book of great value -- I particularly recommend it for anyone without formal design or typography training. After all, those with training should have learned this already. (I suspect they haven't!) But I won't stop there. This is an enlightening and thoughtful work for everyone who has ever wondered how reading happens. The how is as important, and perhaps more important than the why. And you won't really know until you've read While You're Reading
Thanks for reading!
Editor / Publisher: DT&G Magazine
About the Author:
Gerard Unger teaches as visiting Professor at The University of Reading, UK, Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, and taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, until January 2007. As of September 2006, he is Professor of Typography at the University of Leiden. Working as a freelance designer since 1975, he has designed stamps, coins, magazines, newspapers, books, logos, corporate identities, annual reports and other objects, and many typefaces.
Don't miss 
While You're Reading
by Gerard Unger
Page Count: 240, Size: 6 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches, Format: Casebound, with dust jacket
Publication Date: June 2007,
$34.95 - buy now: Price: $23.07 and You Save: $11.88 (34%)
Also see:
Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes 2nd Edition by Colin Wheildon (Author), David Ogilvy (Foreword) "Why should one magazine advertisement generate thousands of inquiries while a similar ad in the same issue for a competing product fails?..."
Dot-font: Talking About Fonts by John D. Berry, and
Dot-font: Talking About Design by John D. Berry (Author)
See similar titles in the Type department Keywords: Typography: type, fonts, faces, how-to use type, selecting type, using fonts
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