Letters From the Page

I’d heard so many good things about this book that I was excit­ed to read it. I was hop­ing for an insight­ful the­o­ry book that would inspire new ways of think­ing about the use of type and typography.

Instead, what I got was a pret­ty good begin­ner’s primer. This is a very prac­ti­cal book and cov­ers a lot of ground, but with­out much depth. There’s a lot of good stuff here for avoid­ing com­mon design mis­takes and for acquir­ing a basic design vocab­u­lary, but not much here for some­one who already has a decent grasp of the fundamentals.

I was quite pleased with the sec­tion on grid-based lay­outs. Ms Lup­ton refreshed me with some­thing bet­ter than a recap of page lay­out fun­da­men­tals. This sec­tion cov­ered a lot that I remem­ber read­ing in Jan Tschi­chold a few years back, except with more mod­ern appli­ca­tions and clear­er descriptions.

I’d be hap­py to rec­om­mend Think­ing With Type to any­one get­ting start­ed in graph­ic design or who has to make basic lay­outs as some oth­er part of their job, but for a seri­ous stu­dent of design I’d sug­gest going straight for the hard stuff. Maybe go to the library, find Think­ing With Type, flip to the bib­li­og­ra­phy and find the titles relat­ed to your discipline.