The Elements of Graphic Design

As a non-practitioner who wanted to learn more about fundamental design, this book nails it. While aesthetics are ultimately a matter of preference, knowing the fundamental reasons and history behind certain graphic design elements is a great help for those who have no formal training or experience in the field.Specifically, the book's treatment of shapes, composition/layout, typography and color helped me formalize my thinking when coming up with new design concepts for our company's web site / web application. It has also piqued my interest in other design fields and graphic design as a whole.The book is accessible for the layperson and serves as an excellent foundation for further exploration in design.

Can't wait to buy the the next edition too!

I liked the book. My experience with graphic design has basically been doing logo headers for personal projects and occasionally formatting writing for clients in an aesthetically appealing manner in order to help them maintain their format when the content goes live.It's fairly basic stuff, and I had an intuitive grasp of most, although not all, of it. If you're looking to learn it, this is a great book to do it.The only problem?The graphic design within the book itself is EXTREMELY busy and distracting. This may be a personal thing, but I found the fact that the borders of each page were absolutely LITTERED with examples of the concepts being discussed to be irritating and made it harder to focus on the information itself.The information is solid, simply presented, and fantastic for a beginner. IF they can get over the poor graphic design present within the book itself.I did like the book, and found it useful, but I'd rather have seen the information presented in a more forthright manner and perhaps the examples on one side of the book rather than being clustered around the information itself and ALSO taking up another page for full sized pictures of design. It doesn't flow, and quite often there's little harmony.Ironic, but I'd still recommend it.

Was an excellent condition and will be very useful for my daughter. Thank you.

I checked out the first edition of this book and it was great. Read the reviews of the second edition and it was much of the same content but expanded. I love that the author kept most of the images and added more. Very clear and easy to follow book. The only slight back from the first is that it is not as compact as the first, however, that is due to nearly doubling of the pages (and added color), which makes it easier to read. Very satisfied with the content where my course alone would have made a lot of aspects of graphic design uninteresting.

This book is a fantastic introduction and in-depth examination of the process of graphic design. The author even outlines its history stretching all the way back to when Pictograms were a form of 'type' as well as exploring the basic tenets of a well designed graphic, regardless of the content or subject.I heartily recommend this book. It is not cursory like other graphic design books I have read, but not so esoteric that a novice to the subject will fall by the wayside.

Thank you!!My book came quick and of course it meets my expectations. I appreciated lil hand-written note attached to my purchase! Definitely a five star bookstore.

This rating is for the KINDLE version, and the single star is due to the layout, not the content. On the written text of the book I give 5 stars (great content!), but because I have the Kindle version I cannot see the true pages of the book. The way my tablet and PC render this book is terrible! The photographs are badly placed - captions appear on separate pages from the image itself. Chapter 3 is a timeline chapter, and the images are not in chronological order. The text appears after the images, and the text refers to the images so there is a lot of back and forth between pages in order to look at the images against the text. I wish Amazon had a PDF version of this book, instead of this terrible ePub (Kindle version). PDF's render text books exactly as the pages appear in the print version. I am not happy about this purchase.