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About Face: Reviving The Rules Of Typography
The computer has made some typographic rules obsolete while others, previously known only to typesetters, have also been forgotten. Despite this, typography remains a fundamental element of graphic design. About Face presents and explains the typography basics required by all graphic designers, from the names of the different parts of characters, typeface styles and their function, to type measurement, typeface families, and type manipulation on the computer. It also looks at typography at work and features a wealth of applied examples by leading designers from around the world, who use, and considerably extend, the rules to create effective, communicative design.
159 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 9, 2022
tl;dr Skip Mr Jury’s wandering mess of a book and go straight to his gospel: Finer Points In The Spacing & Arrangement Of Type, which gives the same bad advice in 83 tightly edited pages.
Having been wholly underwhelmed by my first encounter with Mr Jury’s writing (his introduction to New Typographic Design ) I had discounted this volume until I marked a fleeting but robust endorsement of it in Book Typography , whose author, Ari Rafaeli, seems a difficult person to please. Now having read About Face, I’m pretty sure that Mr Rafaeli’s enthusiasm stems not from having any great esteem for Mr Jury’s prose or design acumen but simply on account of their sharing some pretty uncommon views on typographical minutiæ. Both authors, for example, advocate word spacing that does not adjust for the presence of small punctuation (i.e., a space between words separated by a comma should be no wider than were there no comma) and both recommend placing decimals well off the baseline (e.g. ‘a 4·0 GPA’). They are, in a nutshell, zealots of the same religion.
Neither Mr Jury nor Mr Rafaeli manage to assemble a book with an obvious purpose in this world, but whereas Mr Rafaeli’s prose is clear and occasionally spirited and his correctness on objective matters impeccable, Mr Jury is so hapless a writer that finding his meaning often times requires mentally rearranging his muddled sentences and so poor a scholar that he routinely makes assertions befitting a first‐semester student. Stunningly he mistakes the generic currency symbol (¤) for the Euro sign (€) and the archaic long s (ſ) for a “swash lowercase f”.
The book itself is competently designed within the limitations of its rigid Swiss‐modernist framework, but that framework is so frequently at odds with the lessons Mr Jury attempts to convey that the result is often comedic—or anti‐comedic when Mr Jury attempts to joke. How much can we laugh at a dig about the naïve Microsoft Word user setting documents in Helvetica when that quip appears in a lengthy book set entirely in Univers?
Having been wholly underwhelmed by my first encounter with Mr Jury’s writing (his introduction to New Typographic Design ) I had discounted this volume until I marked a fleeting but robust endorsement of it in Book Typography , whose author, Ari Rafaeli, seems a difficult person to please. Now having read About Face, I’m pretty sure that Mr Rafaeli’s enthusiasm stems not from having any great esteem for Mr Jury’s prose or design acumen but simply on account of their sharing some pretty uncommon views on typographical minutiæ. Both authors, for example, advocate word spacing that does not adjust for the presence of small punctuation (i.e., a space between words separated by a comma should be no wider than were there no comma) and both recommend placing decimals well off the baseline (e.g. ‘a 4·0 GPA’). They are, in a nutshell, zealots of the same religion.
Neither Mr Jury nor Mr Rafaeli manage to assemble a book with an obvious purpose in this world, but whereas Mr Rafaeli’s prose is clear and occasionally spirited and his correctness on objective matters impeccable, Mr Jury is so hapless a writer that finding his meaning often times requires mentally rearranging his muddled sentences and so poor a scholar that he routinely makes assertions befitting a first‐semester student. Stunningly he mistakes the generic currency symbol (¤) for the Euro sign (€) and the archaic long s (ſ) for a “swash lowercase f”.
The book itself is competently designed within the limitations of its rigid Swiss‐modernist framework, but that framework is so frequently at odds with the lessons Mr Jury attempts to convey that the result is often comedic—or anti‐comedic when Mr Jury attempts to joke. How much can we laugh at a dig about the naïve Microsoft Word user setting documents in Helvetica when that quip appears in a lengthy book set entirely in Univers?
September 30, 2014
Highly technical and British. I'm interested in the subject, but not that interested
May 31, 2020
Wie de regels van de typografie wil overtreden moet ze eerst kennen! En zo is het. Fijn naslagwerk, nog steeds!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews