WORDS: Dylan Culhane
Everyone’s a graphic designer, right? Ask just about any person with spectacles, combed hair and slim-fitting jeans on the streets of Cape Town and you’d be forgiven for harbouring this perception.
More fundamentally however, the field of graphic design has undoubtedly infiltrated our lives to an unprecedented extent in an era where desktop publishing is no longer a specialised skill, but something we all do on our laptops: whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation for the boss, a flyer for your cousin’s band, or a party invitation, we’ve all dabbled in the trade whether we realise it or not.
Opening with the eponymous decree, ‘Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans’ is a guide to the fundamentals of graphic design, assembled as a collection of 365 rules from an industry insider’s point of view. Sean Adams – a seasoned practitioner, lecturer, judge and author in the field – has collated the input of four leading professionals, distilling decades of experience into a single compendium. Despite the ‘Old Testament’ framework of the book, the authors have a remarkably approachable and humorous writing style, rationalising instructions with context that is well-researched and thoroughly enlightening (Hands up if you knew that you must always increase a serif font’s italics by a ½ pt in body copy in order to maintain consistent leading, or that you really shouldn’t use more than two Pantone colours with a CMYK print job?).
The guidelines set out in the book are not based on personal taste, but fundamental issues pertaining to legibility, neatness, colour theory, psychology, best practice, printing, and even business relationships (“Thou shall not critcise work previously commissioned from another designer”) – from the perspective of both the designer and the client. This is refreshing, as few things are more annoying than a hipster designer sniggering to himself at some private joke involving blended layers or the inappropriate use of a Grotesque typeface.
‘Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans’ is not only aimed at the amateur designer, but also professionals who might just need the odd reminder about some of the basics that have been forgotten along the way (based on Adam’s own experiences at a night school typography course, detailed in the foreword). It doesn’t presume to be a refresher course for working designers or a textbook for the uninitiated, but is definitely of value to both of these groups; worth keeping as a point of reference, or simply flipping through for the odd golden nugget before tackling a new project.
Neatly divided into six main categories (Type and Typography, Layout and Design, Colour, Imagery and Graphics, Production and Print, The Practice of Design) the book covers the full spectrum of graphic design from a practical and theoretical perspective. The subtitle (‘365 Graphic Design Commandments’) implies this might be a one-a-day ‘calendar reader’ with its reference to the cycle of a full year, but I devoured the book with relish in a single sitting, chuckling at times, and at others shaking my head at the rookie errors I’ve made along the way. As a set of design commandments I’ll definitely be referring to it… well, religiously.
Book title: ‘Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans: 365 Graphic Design Commandments’
Author: Sean Adams et al.
Publisher: Random House Struik
Recommended retail price: R220
More information: www.randomstruik.co.za
