David Kadavy provides us the thought process, a decision-making framework behind design, that he has developed from years of analysis and experimentation.
In the first chapters, he presents typography in its different historical contexts and how it was created and transformed by technological media of the past and its limitations.
On this journey, we deal with the uprising of typography during the Roman empire or in the middle ages, from the milestone of print and its technical requirements to new opentype standards exclusively designed for the limitations of pixels.
The book goes on with the analysis of user experience design as the essential object of the purpose of design and its relation with content, usability and visual design.
Great visual design depends upon great user experience design.Other topics that may be missing in this essential design guide are composition and color. It widely deals with concepts like geometric relationships in composition, visual harmony, content organization, visual hierarchy, color science and theory,contributing a wide range of information about color perception and color management for cross-media.
You'll obtain the visual vocabulary to interpret designs.The author's instructive and practical manner is worthy of mention. We can understand complex issues frequently avoided by designers, like hexadecimal colors and their use in CSS.To sum up, it's got two useful appendixes: "Choosing and pairing fonts" and Typography etiquette", an important, daily consulting resource for any designer.