Graphic design redux: Three book reviews

I've been reading again in my endless quest to understand what graphic design is all about. Today we look at three more books: a book cover designer's collected works, a middling textbook on graphic design, and a great one.

Cover. 2020. Peter Mendelsund.

This is a design monograph in which the author talks about how he came to be a book cover designer, and showcases a lot of his work (including some cover designs that didn't make the cut).

Cover as an autobiography

In the extensive biographical/introductory section, Mendelsund talks a lot about how much easier design is than classical piano music (his previous career), and how quickly he pivoted with less than a year of self teaching.

In talking about how easy cover design is, he comes close to denigrating the art of design, which I found a little odd. I think this is just part of his writing style, in which he swings between self-inflating and self-deprecating, pretentious and humble, as he elaborates on his mental twists and turns.

One thing about Mendelsund shines through in the book: he is thoroughly immersed in the literary. He is truly passionate about reading, which is certainly a trait you'd want in a cover designer.

Cover as a work of design

Overall, the book's design is simple and very nice. Lovely broad margins frame every book cover, fully and elegantly.

I do have some quibbles though. The subheadings on pages 226–229 are charcoal grey set on black, and are extremely difficult to read.

I didn't like the small vertical Teletype text blocks, set with an uncomfortably long line length, near the inner page margin. Just setting them discretely away from the photo horizontally would be fine. 

Ironically, I didn't particularly like the cover of Cover, because it lacks a title or author name, and the collage has no central focus for the eye. An alternative cover for Cover appears in Cover, designed by Mendelsund, and is much nicer.

Cover as a text 

The book's textual commentary is quite good, and really enhances the portfolio section.

I only tripped over a few textual errors (some misplaced footnotes, typos on p. 6 and 129, a bad comma on p. 243, and bad pluralisation on p. 245).

Page 60 is all text, and an important section. It covers reading in the digital age, with various insightful observations on the joy of reading print books. In a puzzling move, Mendelsund (deliberately?) undermines his points by setting the text on this one page at 90 degrees vertical, making it physically frustrating to read.

Cover closes with a sobering discussion of "late style" for artists, a term I wasn't familiar with, and how it might apply to graphic design.

Cover as a portfolio

The covers in the book come from the length of Mendelsund's career, most of it working for Knopf. Almost all of the examples are jackets rather than soft covers.

Many of his designs are minimalist, and all the more striking for it. There are a few 'extravagant' exceptions, like a five-latched box and a pin-perforated cover. 

 

It's neat to see the initial notes, rejected early copies, and then the complete cover designs for e.g. Kafka's works. It's very helpful to see the trajectory of a real designer's work, from start to finish, especially for a whole set of designs.

Cover includes a large section of manga covers Mendelsund designed. It helps offset the pretentious opening, dispelling the idea that the author is a literary snob (which you might otherwise infer). 

Mendelsund created some very clever designs for a public domain books collection (pp. 61–63), including 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Dante's Inferno. All the covers are made using only colour gradients to evoke a core concept and unify them as a collection. This is a difficult design constraint and it's interesting to see how Mendelsund rises to the challenge.

Design is hard. The portfolio includes examples of maybe 30 cover designs for Julio Cortázar's books, Hopscotch and Blow-Up, made over the course of weeks. Mendelsund says that he made 50 more, not included in Cover, before finding his way to the final designs.

Lots of the covers in this portfolio were made physically and then photographed (and presumably further digitally manipulated) to create the final design.

The last word

Cover is a great book. It's worth a read for the cover designs alone, but the commentary on them is very useful, and I enjoyed the additional design insights scattered around.

The language of graphic design. 2011, revised 2018. Richard Poulin.

This is an introductory textbook for graphic design. I've read a ton of these this year, and it's easy for them to blend together.

Poulin's book doesn't stand out from the pack very much. It uses a mixture of student assignments and "artist highlights" as examples.

The chapter structure is also novel, dividing the work up into "point", "line", "shape", "form", "light", etc; this gimmick more or less works, but the link between chapter title and content gets wobbly in a few places in an effort to make sure ideas are delivered in a sensible order. The chapters are also very short, almost all of them 10 pages.

The main stand-out is the case study for each chapter.

The case studies

Per page 10: "each chapter is supplemented with a narrative and visual sidebar that references a key historical benchmark in graphic design history that further illustrates each fundamental element or principle."

Run-on sentence aside, it's a good idea. They are all full-page "sidebars", most of them focused on a particular artist. In practise, I was a little annoyed by how early in each chapter the case study appears, and how they interrupt the flow of the chapter text. I often forgot what the chapter was about by the time I was halfway through the case study. Particularly frustrating when the interruption could be avoided with a single page swap, (e.g., pages 41 and 42), or by just having all the "sidebars" appear after the corresponding chapter.

The disruption of the reading flow is made worse by the fact that some of the case studies are weirdly tangential to the chapter content! For example, the case study for Jan Tschichold, of Penguin Books, appears in the Symmetry chapter but barely mentions symmetry.

These full-page sentence breaks are also particularly jarring when the sentence in question contains a grammatical error, e.g., p 249/251.

The artist highlights are a bit too biographical to be really useful, with too much focus on the artist and not enough on the art/design. I did like learning a bit more about Cassandre (Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron), whose posters I've already been enjoying. But the case study only provides one example of his work!

 

The design

I find myself giving design books an extra level of scrutiny when it comes to their design and layout. There are a few quirks here. For example, The language of graphic design uses small caps not only for every acronym, but for people's initials.

Running heads appear on the right page only, with both the page numbers on that page. It's an audacious design decision but somewhat unhelpful. It becomes a real pain when a right page graphic would overlap with the running head. Then the running head is simply left out, so the reader doesn't know either left or right page number, even when there would have been plenty of room if placed conventionally (or if included on the left).

There's something odd with this book's grid, too. The figure captions are set entirely in bold, and it's too much. The columns are so narrow (maybe 30 characters wide) that sometimes you get two and a half words into a caption and the line breaks with a hyphen. At one point I counted a single sentence split across ten lines!

That said, I really like that the example of the page grid (p. 276) is the book's one. (So you can see that it's peculiar, if not why.)
 

 

The text 

Unfortunately, like so many in its category, this book falls into the "really needed more copy editing" column.

I amused myself as I usually do by highlighting typos as I went:

• A likely copy-paste error resulting in captions like "each of this fundamental design principle" (p. 17), "each of this fundamental design element" (p. 18), etc
• Grammar mistakes on p. 37, 41, 169, 181, 238, 259
• Missing "the" on p. 42
• Erroneous comma on p. 43, 63, 75, 194, 237
• Use of "integrating [...] to", "create [...] to", etc, (p. 50, 82, 198, 230)
• Weird text justification on p. 51
• Bad pairing of hyphen with comma for asides (p. 82, 112)
• "Movment" on p. 95
• Use of a capital X instead of the multiplication symbol × throughout
• "Acheived" on p. 107
• "Moriarity" on p. 124
• Missing space on p. 125
• "Ambiance" on p. 132
• Missing period on p. 168
• "Pixilated" on p. 192
• "A apprenticeship" on p. 229
• Stray hyphen on p. 232
• "Each of will" on p. 240
• "The genesis for [...] is based on" on p. 248
• Missing capital on p. 271

(An error rate of ~1 per 8 pages is far from the worst I've observed for books in this category)

The content

The content is largely correct, as far as I can tell. Some of the titles for the examples are wrong, though. The author also misrepresents what saturation means on page 71, and confuses mass and volume on page 144. But in terms of what it has, it's not a bad introductory work.

The book covers all the topics you'd expect. It's mostly about modern design, apart from some historical artist focuses.

The language is a bit loose and ungrounded. A point can "take on a variety of visual realities". A "category of shape" has "criteria". This sort of thing makes the text seem less polished, and at its worst verges on free association.

The figure captions are absolutely crammed with buzzwords: expect to see clean, diversity, appeal, fresh, bold, energetic, dynamic, or a mixture therefore a few times on every page. Sometimes the description of a design is just a list of positive adjectives. I found this very repetitious, and it's made worse by how many of the examples are about real estate, which I didn't find very engaging. This is perhaps the worst aspect of the book; it becomes mental clag that you just have to slog through in order to extract the actual information about each example from a storm of vague positivity.

The last word

I didn't have much good to say about The language of graphic design in this review, but it's perfectly passable. Like so many of the design textbooks I've read, it needs cleaning up. Some of its daring layout choices don't work. But there are ways to discuss what's going on in a design without it sounding like "marketing babble", and this book falls down there.

 

Graphic design for everyone. 2019. Cath Caldwell (Editor).

Cath Caldwell has produced an extremely slick book that lives up to its title (the authors are Belknap, Hearn, Wood, and Woollams; it's edited by Caldwell).

 

 

When it comes to an introductory text, I really have very few criticisms of Graphic design for everyone. The writing style is clear, concise, and gives good examples. There are only a few textual errors, e.g. on page 65, "The rounded edges give it quirky finish" and "an useful", as well as a few other missing words scattered around.

The advice is very practical. The book's visual design and presentation subtly and smoothly demonstrate the various design lessons it preaches. That gives me a lot of confidence in the book's creators. Visually it is very impressive. My only criticism is that using overprint red for the top of a black box on p 68 results in a slight halo due to misalignment and splits the box between page black and rich black.

The overall structure of the book and its paragraph-to-paragraph information flow work well.

Caldwell et al. include lots of material about digital design which I'm less interested in personally, but which broadens the scope of the book in ways that will be useful to many modern readers. All the book's content seems very up-to-date.

The book is so very solid, I read it cover to cover and most of my notes amount to checkmarks next to each chapter name to say: yep, everything worked there. The more I reflect on Graphic design for everyone, the more I think this is one of the best, simplest design teaching manuals I've read so far. Compare:

• Graphic design for dummies, which has a lot more content, with very thorough worked examples, and lots of practical advice
• The four books I reviewed here, all of them more comprehensive or advanced in some ways than Graphic design for everyone
• Web and digital for graphic designers, which has more coverage and more advanced topics specifically about web design
• Universal principles of design (third edition), with its comprehensive encyclopedia-style list of specific design concepts

Those all contain more information than Graphic design for everyone, and will advance the reader slightly further, but at the cost of poor editing and other problems which make for a worse reading experience. Refreshingly, Graphic design for everyone just executes on the premise very well.

The last word

This book would probably be my go-to recommendation for a true novice, especially someone at say late high school level looking into their career options.

Image and style editing with G'MIC

Let's look at G'MIC, the open-source image processing toolkit!

I think we all benefit from a broad awareness of the powerful changes you can make with classic image processing tools like G'MIC. Nobody needs to resort to generative AI as their first port of call for graphical editing.

G'MIC is available as a plug-in for Affinity, Krita, Photoshop, GIMP, etc, or as a standalone tool. Its huge library of "filters" implement and combine classic image processing algorithms. You can get it at https://gmic.eu/gmic300/ 

I'm going to focus on the most drastic and completely transformative adjustments you can use G'MIC for, showing some of my favourite effects. I'll mostly skip the subtler filters as well as the tools that modern image processing programs usually have built in; suffice to say that G'MIC covers those too.

I'm going to use one input image throughout, to demonstrate various effects. I'll use the following collage that covers a bunch of areas: photographic, cartoon, lineart, discrete object, watercolour, stylisation, realism, areas of light and dark, areas of high and low contrast, hard and soft edges, etc.

Image credits: Fisktak (https://fisktak.itch.io). Publisher’s Choice Quality Stock Art © Rick Hershey / Publisher’s Choice Stock Art (https://patreon.com/StockArt). Adobe Stock.

This is going to be an image-heavy blogpost, as I showcase the outputs of tons of different G'MIC filters on this collage. In some cases, you'll see that a filter works better in one part of the image than in others.

In other cases, the filter will unify all parts of the collage into a single aesthetic. I'm particularly interested in that. When working with stock art and licensed art, it's very helpful to be able to take a bunch of disparate graphical elements from different artists, and adjust them to create a unified style. That confers a stronger sense of an overall project aesthetic and identity.

Combining G'MIC filters with consideration of palette, recurring motifs, proportion, and so on, means that you can pick out assets for a design and not care that they're variously a photo, a watercolour painting, and a vector graphic. You have the tools to translate them into a single visual style.

Let's look at some filters! 

Changing art style

You can use G'MIC to recreate an image as if with traditional media like pens or paintbrushes.

Marker drawing filter:

Sketch filter:

Brushify filter: 

Angoisse anguish filter: 

Changing style: Black & white

Some of G'MIC's filters imitate black-and-white traditional media. These can be quite striking.

Charcoal filter:

Engrave filter:

Lineart filter:

Pencil portrait filter:

Changing style: Flat areas 

There are lots more art styles G'MIC can mimic, including ones with large areas of colour.

Cartoon filter: 

Vector painting filter:

Comic book filter: 

Cubism ['Cubisme B'] filter:

 

Experimental lines

We can change an image's style even more dramatically by using G'MIC to redraw its lines in abstract ways.

Stringify filter:

Black crayon graffiti filter:

Filaments filter: 

Experimental colours

G'MIC also has lots of filters that dramatically change a picture's colours, for various high-contrast effects. The following three are from various contributors' experimental filters.

Frequency representation filter:

Neon filter: 

Hallucinogen filter:

 

Adding effects

We can use filters to overlay all sorts of visual effects on top of an image.

Bokeh filter:

Rain & snow filter:

Random waves filter:

 

Water drops ['drop water'] filter: 

 

Position in space 

There are hundreds of G'MIC filters that re-render the image in different spaces, or that warp its 2D shape in various ways. I've spent a lot of time just turning pictures into abstract art by fiddling with the 3D filters. Many of these could be useful for futuristic settings, backgrounds, and visualisations.

Loose photos filter: 

3D blocks filter: 

3D elevation filter (with Phong lighting): 

 

Glitch effects

There are some good glitch filters in G'MIC. Very useful for science fiction and futuristic edits. I won't show 'Self Glitching' here because it doesn't work as well with the collage but I love it: you can just pop an image in and hit randomise and you'll get something great within a few runs.

Huffman glitch filter:

Shredder filter:

Superstreak filter:

VHS filter:

 

Quantisation

G'MIC has lots of filters that create mosaics, partition or rearrange the image, find and reinforce edges, and so on. Here are some for making a picture into a grid of tiles or other pattern.

Smoothelate filter:

Tiled form filter:

Coloured ellipses ['Ellipses Colorees'] filter:

Hexagonal grid filter: 

Oldschool 8bits filter:

Ascii art filter: 

Weave filter:

Some of the mosaic effects are deeply transformative.

Squares lines ['Carres Lignes'] filter:

Little boxy things filter:

Mineral mosaic filter: 

 

 

Pack ellipses filter:

 

I should finally note that I haven't done G'MIC any favours by using a collage as input. The image has high variability across multiple axes, local clusters of complexity, etc, which really put the filters through their paces. As a result, sometimes an area of the image ends up with disproportionate 'attention'. In a few cases, part disappears completely.

Unless you're using G'MIC as the final stage in compositing, you'll almost certainly get a better result by dialling in some settings you like, then applying the filter to your images separately. To ensure consistency you can copy-paste settings from the plug-in, or process your images as a batch from the command line.

Where G'MIC really shines is when one of the filters is an exact match for the aesthetic of your project. For example, if you need to create a 90s VHS look, then you'll be putting the G'MIC VHS filter on every single image. Similarly for filters like ghost, Dorure Gilding, CRT phosphors, stained glass, oldschool 8bits, wiremap, old photograph, and so on.

Where it becomes really powerful is when you use masks and blend modes to combine the filtered image with the original image for more nuance. You can blend spatially into just the part of an image that should be affected, or blend selectively by value or hue, for some really interesting results. These are approaches I'm still experimenting with, and I think hold a lot of promise.

Tools beyond imagining

G'MIC has close to a thousand filters, including some entire categories I haven't mentioned! For example, you can use G'MIC to procedurally generate and render entirely new images.

Here are some I made by just plugging random values into the parameters of the Chirikov-Taylor, neon lightning, organic fibers, spline spirograph, and Hitomezashi stitching filters.

You can find G'MIC and instructions for using it at https://gmic.eu/gmic300/ .