Thinking With Type 2nd Ed: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)

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With the advent of the Macintosh computer and desktop publishing software in the 1980s, tasks once performed by others, such as typesetting and the creation of mechanicals, fell upon the designer. But what of the typesetter’s knowledge and craft? The appearance of new technologies seems to produce a disconnect between old and new ways of doing things. Something valuable gets lost in the shuffle. Debbie Millman is best known as the host of the design podcast Design Matters. This book is inspired by the monologues she prepares for each episode and features illustrated essays on life and design. Covering topics ranging from brands and behaviour to rituals, love and music, this book will make you think and occasionally laugh out loud. 30. Branding: In Five and a Half Steps by Michael Johnson Concrete thinking is about taking the world literally – or seeking ways to do so. It’s also called literal thinking.

The video centres on Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, the esteemed type design team, who together have created more than 30 typefaces including the ubiquitous Gotham. Useful toolsThis book is about thinking with typography—in the end, the emphasis falls on “with”. Typography is a tool for doing things with: shaping content, giving language a physical body, enabling the social flow of messages (8). If you want to improve this form of thinking, solving puzzles where you are limited to only the pieces you have and cannot bring any outside parts provides great practice. Escape Rooms are great for this, as are games like Hunt a Killer where you solve crimes based solely on the evidence provided. Seven: Divergent Thinking Why Fonts Matter by Sarah Hyndman. Image courtesy of Sara 37. Start Me Up!: New Branding for Businesses by Robert Klanten

Sometimes people avoid concrete thinking because they don’t want to appear stubborn. However, we need more people to insist on evidence that supports the claims people throw around, well… and insist concretely. Of course, the space shuttle team didn’t have a flashlight, so they had to use convergent thinking instead to reach a solution. In 1959, design legends Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar produced a small booklet about typographic creativity. Six decades on, it remains influential, and this reproduction includes added thoughts by other designers including Michael Carabetta, George Lois, April Greiman, Steve Heller and Kit Hinrichs on its lasting impact. 36. Why Fonts Matter by Sarah Hyndman Remember, you only need to understand the basics to type to make an impact in your designs. References and Where to Learn More

Born 1938 in Havana, Cuba, Félix Beltrán, is one of Latin America's most important graphic designers. His works are situated in the tension between abstract geometry and concrete art, and this monograph showcases hundreds of his logos, posters, and book covers. A fascinating and inspiring insight into a great creative mind. 28. Logotype by Michael Evamy

You can visualize this form of metacognition by thinking about digging holes. As de Bono points out, most people dig one hole and if they don’t find the answer they’re looking for, they dig another hole in a different location. If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously remarked, then the primary medium of a book is type. Good books sport good design and the designer needs to know the role played by type. A good choice of type requires some knowledge of how it came to be, the associations it brings to bear, and the way it relates to the subject of the book. Are you interested yet? As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, there’s a difference between types of thinking and methods of thinking. Lupton organizes her presentation into three categories: letter, text, and grid (or spatial organization).This magazine cover uses the Garamond 3 typeface family in various sizes. Although the typeface is classical and conservative, the obsessive, slightly deranged layout is distinctly contemporary. What are Type Superfamilies? Of the book’s three sections, the second (“Text”) is by far the strongest, with crisp and thought‐provoking essays like “Errors and Ownership” and “Birth of the User”.

Analytical thinking typically involves research. As an analytical thinker, you will not be satisfied by the data at hand. You will seek multiple examples so that you can compare and contrast the multiple parts of several examples or case studies.I think I was hoping to be more inspired by the book. I was inspired, but in more subtle ways than I expected. I did learn things that I didn't know about typefaces, and I enjoyed seeing visual representations of the type in text. It gave me secret satisfaction to find a number of proof-reading errors. Quite a few had got in. The typography of the book itself is fantastic. The punctuation is devastatingly accurate and so is the spacing. But some weird spelling escaped somebody's eagle eye. Perhaps it can be a side-line of a designer's eye which looks at the detail and the shapes but somewhere along the line the actual sense can get overlooked? Daniel Skrok and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0 Characteristics of Sans Serif Typefaces: