Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
The organization of letters on a blank sheet -- or screen -- is the most basic challenge facing anyone who practices design. What type of font to use? How big? How should those letters, words, and paragraphs be aligned, spaced, ordered, shaped, and otherwise manipulated? In this groundbreaking new primer, leading design educator and historian Ellen Lupton provides clear and concise guidance for anyone learning or brushing up on their typographic skills. Thinking with Type is divided into three sections: letter, text, and grid. Each section begins with an easy-to-grasp essay that reviews historical, technological, and theoretical concepts, and is then followed by a set of practical exercises that bring the material covered to life. Sections conclude with examples of work by leading practitioners that demonstrate creative possibilities (along with some classic no-no's to avoid).

Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A must for the lost April 8, 2005
157 out of 164 found this review helpful

Personally, this has probably been the most influental design book that I own. I felt like I was a better designer after having read half of it, without once touching my mac. i just knew that what I had absorbed was going to come out in my work, and it did. The book takes an overview look at design, and speaks in plain english about many things that I've heard or dealt with. But catagorizes stuff and explains things in a fluid manner so that the different bits of information come together and make sense. It is good for the novice and the struggling self taught. Full of great examples. It's too elementary for the serious designer. But for someone who did not go to Design School, but now works with design, its the perfect basic "education in a book".

5 out of 5 stars

A much needed book May 21, 2005
97 out of 100 found this review helpful

This is a well-structured and well-written text with refreshing examples from a wide range of designers. These examples reinforce the concept that successful design and typography come from critical thinking and that there is no one style or approach that is "correct."

I plan to require this book in the undergraduate typography class I teach, but because it is accessible even to a novice, I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in type. One of the strengths of the book is its succinctness, but that may be one flaw as well. When a book is so well done, you want more... (Fortunately there is a website which does have supporting materials for those who want more.) Also if you want a meaty book on the specifics of type, then you should also get Robert Bringhurst's phenomenal book "The Elements of Typographic Style." It pairs so well with the overview and examples from Lupton's book.

It is a terrific value and well-produced.

5 out of 5 stars

More books should be this good--and price as aggressively June 30, 2005
39 out of 43 found this review helpful

As the author of Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing, I approach design and type books with high expectations.

I judge books on not only the amount of information they communicate, but also the accessibility of the information, the clarity of the visuals, the design of the pages, and--last, but not least--the price.

Ellen Luppon's Thinking With Type scores well on all standards. It's also one of the few books that has important things to say about online type.

At its remably low price, you can't buy a more useful book for learning from the past and setting computer-based type on the basis of what others have done previously.

2 out of 5 stars

Glossy, colorful, devoid of substance October 9, 2007
26 out of 31 found this review helpful

Ellen Lupton's "Thinking with Type" is a strange book that exists because of itself. It uses different fonts and colors and layout to tell you about different fonts and colors and layout. Even the example text is about itself, and not Lorem Ipsum or some such (for example, "This is Helvetica 9 point" written in Helvetica 9 point).

This is about as meta as you can get, a work of reflexive modern art if you will. Think Godel, Lupton, Bach? But it advertises itself as A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers and Editors, which it surely, emphatically, is not. I learned more from the first few pages of Parker's Looking Good in Print -- a fine book every one of whose commandments Lupton manages to violate -- than from this opus of navel-gazing.

A few concrete things wrong with it: well, the obvious one is that since every design element in this book exists to show itself, the book as a whole is extremely difficult to read. This is exacerbated by bad Index and Table of Contents... the only reason they exist is because they should (sum ergo sum). The fancy rendering of chapters (of which there are three, yes three; moreover they have monosyllabic titles) and sections add to this weird where-am-I-in-the-text effect.

At a graphic design contest level, this might be interesting, but at a "critical guide" level, it is criminal -- worse than type crime. This book suffers from the unpardonable crime of overdesign at any macroscopic level you'd care to think about. Moreover, it simply lacks substance. If a tenth of the time spent typesetting this book had been allocated to actual content, it could have turned out all right. As such, it is full of gloss and color, signifying nothing.

5 out of 5 stars

Simple, Clear, and Logical May 14, 2006
20 out of 22 found this review helpful

This book is possibly the best design education text I've seen. Everything is kept simple, and clear. Ellen Lupton's categorizing of typeface styles, for example, is logical and all inclusive, yet still a simple breakdown of the vast variety of typefaces. She is easier to understand than Robert Bringhurst in "The Elements of Typographic Style," something crucial to any budding designer. This book will serve you well.

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