It's Febreviewary! I'm reviewing four graphic design books in this post. They're all written by Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris, sometimes with a third author.
Enter the Ambrose-Harris Vortex
The design books I've read so far in 2026 have been tied by an unexpected thread: Their remarkable number of typos and textual errors, despite in some sense being "text objects about making good text objects".
So far we've had the book that misspells its own title and the book with the broken index. Today we'll be looking at, amongst other things, a book with a remarkably wrong colour wheel.
I should note first off that the errors aren't a deal-breaker. These books are informative, visually delightful, and full of great examples of graphic design work. That they're very good books on the whole really just highlights how shockingly un-proofread they are. If they also had mediocre content, poor writing style, dull layout, etc, then I would have written them off and moved on, instead of bothering to note down the details for these reviews. Unfair? C'est la vie.
Book 1:
The fundamentals of typography (third edition). 2020. Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris & Sallyanne Theodosiou.
This is a comprehensive primer. Between Practical typography and Typography essentials, I was already familiar with a lot of the basic instructional information that's given in The fundamentals of typography, but it was a comfortable familiarity. I think it would be a good introduction for a beginner or would serve in some respects as a reference work.
I found some of the visuals quite inspiring, and made some notes about things to try. Check out this neat bit of graphic typography, for example:
The book is pretty good about identifying its lettering examples, only occasionally mentioning a typeface without a visual example or giving an example without naming the typeface.
Problems
The fundamentals of typography contains lots of basic typos (e.g., a repeated "the the", page 41). Beyond that, some poor wordings are compounded by a surprising number of outright textual errors in the examples constructed by the authors.
The first example of leading on a baselines grid on page 51, for instance, is incorrectly described as having "an effective leading of 24pt" and then is discussed in several contradictory ways.
An example of text justification causing too broad word spacing in spots somehow manages to place the highlight boxes over random parts of the paragraph, not over the spaces in question. This kind of error left me with the overall impression that some systematic reformatting done for an edition update broke some of the examples, and the creators never bothered to find and fix them.
In summary
A solid introductory text let down by frankly amateurish errors. The book reproduces tons of nice pieces of typography from various designers, and is quite enjoyable to page through just to look at.
Book 2:
The fundamentals of creative design (second edition). 2011. Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris.
This is a great design book. It's wide-ranging and comprehensive. Some of the material is shared with the other Ambrose & Harris books I'm reading, but most is new. The examples of graphic design work are numerous and on-point, and occasionally exquisite. I particularly enjoyed reading the chapter on layout and grids, and I also found the discussion of semiotics useful.
The book's visual design is just as nice as you'd expect. It's subtly colour-coded. Various varnishes, page treatments, and spot colours are used illustratively, to great effect.
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| Andy Potts design (page 105) |
This is, I suppose, a fairly old book now. 2011 still feels recent to me, but 15 years on it really jumps out when the book mentions Youtube and Flash Player ('the format of choice for embedding video on the web') in the same breath. The whole 'for screen' section was a miss for me, but the only one.
More sloppiness
I spotted the first typo on page 10 ("In turn, became were the basis for") and these proved to be omnipresent. The authors also have a problem with occasional poor sentence structures leading to ambiguous meanings.
More importantly, just as in The fundamentals of typography, the examples of real world graphic design soar, but the examples constructed by the authors are a joke. This book is riddled with diagrams which embarrassingly don't work. e.g.:
- Page 57 says "Although the bottom part of the letters in this subheading have [sic] been removed, it can still be read easily." The bottom part has not been removed.
- Page 124 mixes up left and right.
- Pages 137 and 169 have example images that don't match their descriptions (a greyscale image is meant to be magenta, and spot varnish is not applied as the authors describe).
- The colour wheel on page 126 is preposterously mislabelled:
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Sorry for the poor photo. The two colours you can't see are labelled as yellow (correctly) and yellow-green (arguably correctly). |
It's hard to even count the colour wheel errors because it's so mangled. I think it's meant to be a cyan-magenta-yellow colour wheel, because yellow and magenta (the latter mislabelled as 'red-orange') are labelled as primary, and cyan is included (albeit mislabelled as a secondary colour). The twelve hues are what you'd expect: it includes the tertiary rose hue between magenta and red, and it has three hues for red through yellow where a red-blue-yellow wheel would have five.
...But the tertiary hue labels are for a red-blue-yellow colour wheel: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, yellow-green, and blue-green. And these aren't even a 'best effort' to try to apply the R-B-Y labels to a C-M-Y wheel! They only have the word 'primary' on there twice! Yellow-orange is between yellow and red! There are two red-oranges!
I assumed at first this got broken during an edition update, but nope: I managed to find the original (2003) edition and it doesn't include a colour wheel at all. What happened?
In summary
I like this book as an instructional text, and the examples of people's graphic design work are so good. A real shame about the errors. I've been thinking about that colour wheel for weeks.
Book 3:
The layout book (second edition). 2015. Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris.
I like the opening quote, which articulates my reason for wanting to learn more graphic design:
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
– Charles Eames
I want to have a more purposeful approach to every page I make, and have the skills and tools at hand for doing so.
It's unfortunate
I am still deep in the Ambrose-Harris Vortex. The layout book gets sloppy immediately.
- There's a 38-word run on sentence in the first paragraph of the first chapter.
- Page 12 is missing a sentence subject.
- There are missing commas every few pages, plus a few unnecessary extra commas (e.g. pages 17, 149, 164).
- Page 19 alone has a missing space, a missing comma, a missing word, and begins two sentences in a row with "Here, the".
- Page 86 has a section on creep (a technical term) without ever saying what it is. Other times it was unclear whether an out-of-place word was an undefined graphical design term which the reader should go look up, or simply the result of a botched sentence. See e.g. "reveals" on page 150.
- Some sentences have a singular/plural mismatch (e.g. pages 144, 150).
- There are tons of basic typos that should be picked up by automatic spellchecking (e.g. page 145, "mutliple"; page 114, "0dominate"; page 176, "challanges"; page 179, "picutred").
- The instructions on page 73 for dividing a golden rectangle end with "multiply by 1" for some reason.
- The page 184 caption is a run-on sentence of more than a dozen phrases.
- Page 99 changes horses in midstream with "Notice how use of a grid to create balanced areas of intervention, where text blocks mirror adjacent images or white space."
There are awkward phrasings or grammatical errors on almost every spread. I just don't understand how everything else about the book is so nice but they couldn't be bothered to fix the text-level stuff. Speaking as a former semiprofessional copy editor, you don't even need to hire one to pick up most of this stuff! The authors could have just taken a day to read their text aloud and noticed 95% of it!
Take the phrase-salad on page 92. Incorrect comma usage and subject/object mismatch, plural/singular mismatch, all in one paragraph. You can tell there's a text problem from the most casual read. It really comes across as text that was drafted but at most got a single edit at the paragraph level.
On the bright side, there were fewer author-made examples in this book. The systematic botching of them seen in the previous two books wasn't present; I only noticed a couple of very minor mistakes. In fact, a part of the book I liked the most included this straightforward author-constructed example of layout elements (and the accompanying discussion):
Size
This is a 22×30 cm book. It's really nice to have a larger space with so much allocated to visual examples. The authors also break up the text by switching to a large point size for introductory paragraphs, which I don't consciously care about but which I have to presume is a considered, psychologically effective choice (given that this is The layout book).
Structure
The book's six chapters cover historical context, basic layout principles, grids, page objects, interviews with designers, and reader exercises. The last two make The layout book stand out from the other primers I've read.
This book helped me understand hierarchy and orientation in particular and was worth it for that alone. Generally the content is very good. At its worst, there are a few cases where the authors fall into the trap of saying that a thing can be done but not properly explaining how it can be done, relying too heavily on the book's (again, just excellent) real-world-design visual examples. This happens e.g. in the analogy of depth-of-field to hierarchy and layering on page 150.
In summary
I liked The layout book. It's a visual extravaganza. I think I'd have enjoyed it more if I wasn't coming from two other books by the same authors, covering some overlapping ground, with the same boatload of sloppy errors.
Book 4:
The fundamentals of graphic design (second edition). 2020. Gavin Ambrose, Paul Harris, & Nigel Ball.
I'll admit, I picked this one up weeks after reading the others, just out of a perverse sense of curiosity. Would it continue the pattern?
Visual design
Each chapter page has a footnote looking ahead to the chapter contents in short-form, with page references, a bit like an old-fashioned novel summarising the chapter's contents ahead of time.
Odd book design choices I wish I knew the creators' reason for:
- They use a large-sized display font for the opening body text in each spread.
- There's a text adornment gimmick: a long underline at the start of each introductory paragraph for a new section. A hundred instances of that meant at least fifty times that I instinctively tried for a moment to 'solve' the text like a crossword clue. Probably not what they intended!
- Subsection headings are set in green boxes, subsubsection headings in white boxes, but the text is flush with the bottom of the box (so that letters with descenders dangle out of it) for some reason.
The callout boxes at the bottom of the page used to define terms of art are a nice touch, although I was amused on page 62 when the definition of 'values' relied on four-dollar words like 'acrimonious'.
The book's accompanying glossary is very comprehensive (seven pages)!
Content and writing
This book's take on the classic what is graphic design? opener includes (page 8):
Graphic design takes ideas, concepts, text and images and presents them in a visually engaging form through print, digital, or other media. It imposes an order and structure to the content in order to facilitate and ease the communication process, while optimizing the likelihood that the message will be received and understood by the target audience. A designer achieves this goal through the conscious manipulation of elements [...]
...which I rather like. It sets expectations that the book is going to be slightly more pragmatic than the others; these were borne out. The authors describe the expected commercial/studio graphic design process, walking through the steps, and go into some detail on the practicalities of paper, ink, production, packaging, etc.
By necessity, there's a fair amount of overlap with the other Ambrose-Harris books, but refreshingly few repeated examples of real-world design (I'd guess 98%+ were new).
The authors impressed me by covering all the bases and then finding room throughout for some really thoughtful discourse. There are short essays on social responsibility, consumerism, anti-consumerism, "subvertisements", greenwashing, design as a non-neutral process, and the "misery of choice".
Aside: I find that as I get old and set in my ways I'm caring far more about the serial comma. The authors refuse to include it, but are at least consistent about it. Still, it really is conspicuous in its absence, creating a visual hiccup every time you miss it and have to re-parse the word 'and'. Why choose to make your text harder to read?
Are there text-level problems?
No prizes for guessing yes. I noticed all sorts of basic errors:
- Agency accidentally assigned to an immersive experience (page 7).
- Misuse of words and phrases like "despite" (page 11), "impact on" (pages 14, 42), "comprising of" (page 58), and "resided" (for "resized", page 159).
- Several missing spaces on page 57 and missing words like "the" on page 89.
- Faulty pluralisation in a few places, like "is"/"are" confusion on page 68, and "access to a mobile devices" on page 152.
- Grammar mistakes that smack of hastily rewritten sentences. On page 108: "[...] a wide range of flexibility in the finish, which can be obtained in the final product and the print run possible."
(The authors also use "his or her", a phrase I'd consider deprecated by this point.)
There are only about 15 author-created examples in this book, and perhaps due to that relative paucity, none of them were outright broken. The "communication flow between agencies and clients" diagram on page 143 does approach that status. It ought to serve as an aid to comprehending the text, but this one is so abstract that a reader who hasn't already understood the main text won't be able to puzzle out the meaning of the diagram.
In summary
The fundamentals of graphic design didn't wow me quite as much with its real-world graphic design examples as the other Ambrose & Harris books. But it covered a lot of ground in quite practical ways, and the interspersed high-level ethical and philosophical treatments of graphic design considerations were a pleasant surprise.
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Closing thoughts
All books have flaws. It was a weird experience to read books so deeply flawed in one aspect and almost impeccable in all the others.
Reflecting, I think all four books were very good at 'describing the process' but fell slightly short on 'teaching the process'. I would have been interested in an extra chapter in each for the authors to go through one or two examples in meticulous detail. The fundamentals of typography could have picked fonts or modified typography for particular situations, The layout book could have worked through the actual process of deciding and applying a layout, and the two design books could have gone from a brief to completed design. A missed opportunity.
I should emphasise in closing that I'd still recommend these books.
Okay, fling me free of the Ambrose-Harris Vortex. I have a few more graphic design books to read and review this month and I think they're going to be a change of pace.
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