Steven Heller and Gail Anderson have released The Typography Idea Book, geared toward helping you evolve different typographic characters or styles.
“What this book is not is a tutorial in typographic basics — kerning, spacing, selecting, and so on. There are many excellent existing volumes that will give you that essential knowledge. Our intention here is to lay out many of the fun, esoteric and eccentric options a typographer has at his or her disposal.”
Each spread shows a typographic project on one page, with a description and commentary on the other, featuring the work of 50 designers such as Alan Fletcher, Saul Bass, Zuzana Licko, Neville Brody.
Julie Rutigliano and Brian Lightbody, 2008, Rock the Vote
Alvin Lustig, 1945, The Great Gatsby
Alan Kitching, 1999, Baseline magazine
The page layouts let the work take centre stage, and it’s hard to imagine a broader mix of typographic styles covered over 100 pages. That’s great. And after just a few minutes of reading, I was thinking about how I could bring different ideas into my client work. I would’ve preferred a bigger type size for the body text, because the content is excellent — both in background detail and commentary — but it’s always a shame when books (especially typography books) aren’t as easy to read as they could be.
OCD, 2013, Free
Zsuzsanna Ilijin, 2010, Where are the Flying Cars?
Jonny Hannah, 2011, Lord Have Mercy
Michiel Schuurman, 2010, The Catalyst’s Agenda
Experimental Jetset, 2004, net zo blind als wij
Roger Excoffon, 1958, Calypso
The Typography Idea Book is available from Laurence King, and here on Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk.
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