Victoria Squire

What is it about design books being badly designed?? It's largely samples of text, with various comments alongside. Most of which text is printed in a pale brown / dark beige colour (roughly the cover colour). On a glossy white paper. So for a book that's at least a third all about "readability", they don't take much interest in accessibility for themselves.

It's an odd book. Maybe handy to keep on the office shelf, so that when someone does something awful, you can turn to the relevant page.
But it looks like it's a handy primer guide for newbies, written some time in the forward-looking '70s (OK, maybe the '80s) and yet it's completely unreadable unless you already know what's in here. So revision notes for 1st year students? Weird. It's a great idea for a book, but it falls very short with what it delivers.

It discusses readability in great detail. It even has a couple of pages printed on different types of paper, just to make a point. It discusses every detail and nuance of typeface choice, except that little thing about sans vs serifs. (I told you it looked like the '70s). The only serif they seem to like in here is Rockwell, the great big clumpy boots of type.

Computers don't exist. There's one paragraph about the web. An appendix on Mac keystrokes for special characters (clearly no-one here uses PCs). No discussion of tools with which to achieve these readability goals.

They wrap uncoordinated as "unco-
ordinated". Barbarians.… (mehr)