Graphic design again: Three book reviews

Today I report on three recent graphic design books. I'll be covering a great modern theory book, a collection of found typography, and a portfolio of New Zealand batik artwork.

Book 1:

Universal principles of design (third edition). 2023. William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler

This book lays out 200 principles of design, encyclopedia-style.

Text 

This was one of the best books I read this year. The writing has an exceptional clarity at the sentence level and in its flow from one proposition to the next. Much of it is quite idea-dense and abstract, necessitating reading slowly to absorb the text.

The authors phrase things precisely and confidently. "Sound design is not the exclusive purview of a talented few" (Introduction). They expect an educated reader. "They are combined here because they are invariably combined in practice." (#151, Prototyping) If the writing has a fault, it's the occasional American-specific sports metaphor.

This is one of the only design books I've read that's not riddled with typos! Where most of the books I've been reviewing have errors on every page, I noticed just four across 400 pages, to wit: "shouild" in #107 (Legibility); "crticial" and "four-steps" in #142 (Poka-Yoke); "i.e." for "e.g." (#156, Redundancy).

Book design 

Universal principles of design is very professionally put together. The consistency of the layout lends it power, and each section is furnished with see-alsos, references, and links. There are two tables of contents with different orderings, and an index. I've died and gone to book design heaven.

If I have any complaint it's that the text is somewhat small, near the border of legibility. A typography example suggests it may be Trade Gothic set at 9 pt.

Content

The book covers 200 high-level design principles across many domains. Each concept is given with visual examples to discuss. These are elegant and minimalist, with a slight bias towards aerospace examples (one author is a NASA "human factors guru").

Some of the principles are interestingly specific, e.g., #093 (Icarus Matrix), which I could find very little outside information about, and #111 (Magic Triangle), which only applies to Muppet design(!)

I'm not a fan of changing the meanings of existing terms. #128 (Ockham's Razor) presents a concept in the design space which is analogous to, but different from, the established meaning of "Ockham's razor". Conversely, Clarke's Laws are given as a design principle, where they would have benefitted from being rephrased in a more design-specific way.

There is necessarily some overlap in the principles. The sentiment "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted" might appear half a dozen times in support of as many different-but-related concepts.

The authors have strong opinions and an evidence-based lean (although I could have done without the occasional flimsy evo-psych). They discuss how the foundational priming experiments (#144, Priming) mostly failed to replicate (albeit springing that disclaimer only after giving lots of details about it in the visual example).

They also pour cold water on the Golden Ratio and the rule of thirds, which "plays, at best, a minor role in creating aesthetic compositions but a valuable role in focusing attention." (#160, Rule of Thirds) I found the guidance useful enough to write it down:

1. If there is a strong primary element, centre it. Don't use the Rule of Thirds.

2. If there are two strong elements, balance them: position them at (especially diagonally) opposing intersections with the Rule of Thirds.

3. When there is a strong vertical or horizontal element, align it along one of the grid lines of the Rule of Thirds.

4. When there are many elements with similar visual weight, don't use the Rule of Thirds. 

I particularly enjoyed learning about Conway's Law (#040), Inverted Pyramid (#099), Poka-Yoke (#142), Visuospatial Resonance (#193), and some of the more philosophical discussion in e.g. Causal Reductionism (#023) and Root Cause (#158). The use of the Vasa warship to illustrate Feature Creep (#063) was very funny.

I'm reading design books this year because of my renewed interest in visual design, making the sections on Consistency (#035), Figure-Ground (#067), Highlighting (#091), and the von Restorff Effect (#194) interesting too. 

In summary

Universal principles of design is an absolute delight. The first time in a while that I'd like to own a shiny new copy of a book.

 

Book 2:

Look & see. 2018. Anthony Burrill

In this book, Burrill curates some of his collection of typography examples. These are reproduced reduced to black and white, with resulting grunge/distress effects. The typography is always black, never inverted or coloured, but there is simple, tasteful use of overprinted block colours for contrast.

 

 

Burrill has selected the "found typography" both for its characteristics and for its interesting provenances, which are described. The writing is somewhat amateurish, with its share of errors. It's somewhere in the triangle of poetic, banal, and twee, which I found made for a very easy read. I think it succeeds as a coffee table book, and could serve as inspiration for someone working closely with type.

The book's layout uses a fascinatingly wide typeface for body text, and is prolific with its arrows in a multiplicity of styles. Sometimes these design books have quite experimental features and I wish they'd explain them as they went!

 

In summary

Look & see is a fairly lightweight and relaxing read. I got a few ideas and laughed at a few curiosities, which is probably what you hope for out of a book like this.

Book 3:

 

An eccentric history in batik. 2025. Dinah Priestley

This new 242-page book showcases the art of Dinah Priestley and the late Tony Burton.

The text

After a rather stuffy guest foreword, the book is quite approachable.

Priestley describes her experiences with batik (traditional patterned dyeing using wax resist), as well as offering a sort of biography of her artistic life with Burton. I found myself wanting more details on the batik side.

A lot of Priestley's and Burton's art depicts parts of New Zealand history from older times into the early 21st Century, covering for example the Land Wars. With Priestley explaining the artworks, the textual content ends up comprising a mostly-unflinching look at New Zealand history.

Priestley's writing is rough and ready, but not bad. The authorial tone does sometimes dip into a sort of prim self-righteousness, e.g., trying to recast being a bad speller into an unalloyed good. But it's vivid and easy to follow. There are a few grammatical mistakes that unfortunately jump out at the most serious points (e.g., 'burnt alive' for 'burned alive').

Art

I wasn't familiar with Priestley or Burton, and enjoyed seeing their work. This book showcases hundreds of pieces, almost all in batik, but supplemented with cartoons and masks.

The art itself is wonderful. The unusual style of the artists, reminiscent of children's book illustrations newspaper cartoons and old woodcuts, is really set off by the choice of medium.

18th Century French Explorers Collecting Fauna

Annie Burnell Beauchamp

The fabulous Sir Edmund Halley 1986

1980s Wellington Stock Exchange

Layout

The book's chapters are casual, and their structure not too ordered: 'Blokes', 'Nightclubs', 'Sporty Types', 'Mistresses', etc. 'Blokes' comprises "fathers, gardeners, musicians, poets, wharfies, artists, kayak instructors, cricketers" and has the distinctive quirk of listing the ethnicity of almost every portrait subject, perhaps because the writer is from a certain time.

I liked the visual formatting. The book is laid out on a simple grid but doesn't keep to it strictly, as the batiks come in a variety of shapes and sizes (and the designer tries to set many of them to full pages). I notice that two minor variations of the 'Nikau and the Botanists' artwork are shown on pages 54 and 159, likely by mistake.

In summary

I read too few New Zealand books. I picked up An eccentric history in batik on a whim and Priestley's distinctive style really sold me. It's a visual treat.

 

Weird maps: Three book reviews

It's Febreviewary!

Last month I set myself a 2026 challenge to learn a bit more graphic design and got some practise in by making a new TTRPG-aligned poster every day.

As part of that, I've been reading all sorts of art books to see how people put things together. Here are my reviews of three books of fantastical maps: Plotted, Strange maps, and City across time.

More reviews to come later this month.

 

Plotted: A literary atlas. 2015. Andrew DeGraff (illustrator), Daniel Harmon (editor and essayist).

This book takes classic English-language books and converts their plots into maps. As such it is full of exquisite illustrations, with some lightweight literary commentary on each one.

The concept is interesting, but it has hits and misses.

The good 

DeGraff has created some truly stellar illustrations, including in the graphic designs for the title pages. I like this title for Moby Dick in particular:

Plotted – Moby Dick (title). Andrew DeGraff.

The main illustration provided for Moby Dick is an exploded/cutaway diagram of a whale, labelled in the way that it would be butchered by whalers. It's a fascinating and compelling piece, if gross, and probably the book's strongest deviation from the 'map' theme.

Another favourite is the Library of Babel. This world of infinitely tessellating rooms really got my TTRPG gears turning, but that's as much on the original work, which is one of only a few Borges stories I've read (something I must remedy someday).

Plotted – The Library of Babel (diagram). Andrew DeGraff. 

There are some interesting design decisions. For example, charting the arcs of characters' lives towards marriage for Pride & Prejudice makes for a neat visual.

 

Plotted – Pride & Prejudice (marriage map; cropped). Andrew DeGraff.

 

The stretches

A repeated motif in Plotted is the tracking of characters, showing the paths they take through their fictive worlds. I'm not sure I'm sold on these traces. They look nice, but what do they add as an infographic? For people familiar with the work, I don't think it really reveals much. For people unfamiliar, it's just messy layers of lines that don't say much about the text.

Plotted – A Christmas Carol (map). Andrew DeGraff.

 

The trace technique is at its weakest in e.g. the illustrations for A Christmas Carol or Hamlet, where it just shows routes taken around a town or a couple of buildings.

On the other hand, it was a great fit for Around The World In 80 Days! I just think these character traces were over-used.

There are a couple of real stretches to force a text into the mold of the book's premise. Take the illustration for A Narrow Fellow In The Grass by Emily Dickinson. The source text is a 128-word poem, and Charted creates a graphic for it which (a) is barely a map, (b) goes well beyond the actual textual content, and (c) still doesn't have much to say. The book's front matter mentions that to some extent the artist and essayist just picked their favourite pieces of literature, and I'm guessing that's what happened here.

That's one of the things which made me conclude that a better premise for this project would have been to create a wider variety of pseudo-infographic non-traditional illustrations, some of which happen to be maps. Again, that Moby Dick exploded diagram (not a map) was incredible!

By modifying the approach like that you could avoid the pitfalls of the unremarkable character traces and forcing maps onto texts that are deeply unsuited to them, although of course you could no longer call it "a literary atlas".

In summary

The premise isn't as strong as it sounds, but the book is a visual feast regardless, and there are some stand-outs that individually make it worth taking a look. You'll probably get more out of Plotted the more of the texts you're familiar with.

 

Strange maps: An atlas of cartographic curiosities. 2009. Frank Jacobs.

This book lives up to its name. It's filled with all kinds of interesting things, from fictional islands to the Land of Oz to maps made of the North Pole before we knew what it looked like.

Strange Maps – The Land of Oz

 

The book is divided into sections, so we have maps of places from fiction in one, propaganda and political maps in another (the ten-state Australia is remarkable), etc.

Also abstract or fantastical illustrations of real places:

Strange Maps – Vancouver

 

My favourite map? Probably an 1834 visualisation of the world's major rivers descending into a fictional sinkhole.

Strange maps also contains the most full explanation of enclaves, exclaves, and fragments that I didn't know I needed.

Minor quibbles 

The book has some unexamined colonial language. That's unfortunate for something published as recently as 2009.

There are a couple of sections containing a lot of America-centric maps which mean little to someone outside the country. A 'cartographic curiosity' that you have to be from a particular culture to appreciate isn't very exciting. Having page after page of them becomes tedious.

The book is well-made; I only have one criticism in that regard. The large form factor makes plenty of space for the maps, but the downside is that this sometimes means a map on one page and accompanying text filling the facing page. And while often this is necessary to explain the broader historical context, sometimes the author struggles to find something interesting to say, using trivia and colour commentary to fill a huge empty page. Just leave it blank!

In summary

A fascinating book. Definitely worth picking up, although I wouldn't be afraid to skim bits of it to get to the best stuff. The fictional maps are visually interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the real-world absurdities:

Strange Maps – Market Reef

City across time. 2019. Peter Kent.

This is a children's book illustrating how an imagined city changes across the course of history, with cross-sections showing how archaeological objects are laid down in the strata.

I grabbed a copy because I'm a sucker for cross-sections, and I thought it might be useful for the dungeon archaeology project I have coming up. And it's definitely inspired me!

The book instructs you to “look carefully to see how the buildings people knock down and the garbage they drop create the layers of history beneath their feet”, and it knocks it out of the park.

Page spreads from City across time. Peter Kent.

I'm no judge of children's books, but Kent's writing seems perfectly serviceable. He is also the illustrator, and does a truly wonderful job with the visual storytelling.

The process of archaeological deposits being laid down as the city progresses through historical periods is shown with unbelievable artifice, often in the subtlest little minutiae, which the text never draws attention to. Post holes show up where structures were. Tiny objects are lost and buried. Features from former eras are re-used. Strata are dug into and disrupted. All of it is delightfully illustrated.

There is something very emotionally impactful about showing the accretion of history in a single place as people and civilisations come and go. 

The book opens with Stone Age people hunting mammoths and discussions of the misnomer 'caveman' and the role of caves as religious sites; it closes in a postapocalyptic future Earth where a dark ruined basement is full of things the post-fall people have collected, a site with a clear religious/burial role, and paintings daubed on the wall.

 

Cropped page showing a basement serving a similar role of a cave to prehistoric people.

In summary

City across time was one of my favourite books to read in the last couple of months. You have to bear in mind that it's a children's book, so you'll only get so much from the textual content, but I really appreciate the depth of thought and planning that went into the illustrations. And the results speak for themselves. This got me fired up to work on Dungeon Dig Site, and wanting to draw some cross-sections of my own.