A comprehensive text and reference. Document Design lays out the principles, theories, and processes for designing documents from planning to printing. Focusing on the choices that designers make throughout the process, the text introduces students to the fundamentals of designing pages, whole documents, and information graphics; choosing color, typefaces, and images; and managing projects strategically, from analyzing user needs to inventing, prototyping, usability testing, and printing options.
A practical working vocabulary for analyzing and designing documents. Part One provides students with a solid foundation for thinking critically about the visual by introducing the terms and principles at the heart of good design practices. These introductory chapters illustrate the rhetorical principles of design — similarity, contrast, proximity, alignment, order, enclosure — and offer a unique overview of the rhetorical, cultural, and cognitive theories which are returned to throughout the book.
Up-to-date advice about today’s digital tools, processes, and formats. Which typefaces work on screen but not in print? How do colors on screen translate to paper? How do color-pickers work? The only document design text for the classroom to address recent developments in technology, Document Design alerts students to the electronic design and production issues that they need to consider as they design their own documents.
A book that shows the principles of good design in action, with an 8-page color insert. Both easy to use and easy to follow, this carefully-designed classroom text is a pleasure to teach from and read.
More than 100 illustrations and 150 sample documents in the book and online. A range of examples from simple brochures to pamphlets, flyers, information sheets, newsletters, and web sites provides real models for students to analyze and discuss. Plus, all of the sample documents are available in color on the companion Web site, bedfordstmartins.com/documentdesign.
Assignments and exercises at the end of each chapter. Opportunities to explore, analyze, and practice the principles laid out in each chapter encourage students to collect their own inspiring examples of documents for study and to develop projects that they can use to build portfolios of their own work.