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| Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs) | 
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| Author: Ellen Lupton
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $12.00
You Save: $9.95 (45%)
Buy New/Used from $12.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (49 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1662
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 7 x 0.6
ISBN: 1568984480
Dewey Decimal Number: 686.22
EAN: 9781568984483
ASIN: 1568984480
Publication Date: September 9, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 sophomoric December 10, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Low on substance, weak on style, sophomoric in execution. I completely agree with Chengiz ("Glossy, colorful, devoid of substance").
Here are some better books on typography:
The Elements of Typographic Sytle (Robert Bringhurst)
A Type Primer (John Kane)
Anatomy of a Typeface (Alexander Lawson)
 Getting into type November 11, 2007
I'm not a designer or a graphic artist, but I find typography interesting. This book was detailed, but accessible enough for an absolute begginer.
Required Reading! October 29, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book should be required reading for anyone who uses type! If you thought like I did that graphic design was all about having 'artistic sense', well you'll get a jolt as you read this book that reveals well-articulated design principles. Not only does this book describe how type works, but also shows you how to apply them using numerous beautiful, uncompromising examples.
If you are new to graphic design or are looking to understand just what makes those graphic designs you see around you so stunning compared to what you can come up with, you need this book.
Make sure to also get the Rockport 'workbooks' about layout, color, etc. to round off your education.
Who Knew? October 26, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Whether or not you've ever kerned, tracked, adjusted leading or anything else even remotely related to looking at a typeface for longer than it took to simply read what it said, this book will surely enlighten you on some level.
Nice examples and good historical references in addition to clear and concise definitions.
If you're a student of communication design, this is a must.
 Glossy, colorful, devoid of substance October 9, 2007
26 out of 31 found this review helpful
Ellen Lupton's "Thinking with Type" is a strange book that exists because of itself. It uses different fonts and colors and layout to tell you about different fonts and colors and layout. Even the example text is about itself, and not Lorem Ipsum or some such (for example, "This is Helvetica 9 point" written in Helvetica 9 point).
This is about as meta as you can get, a work of reflexive modern art if you will. Think Godel, Lupton, Bach? But it advertises itself as A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers and Editors, which it surely, emphatically, is not. I learned more from the first few pages of Parker's Looking Good in Print -- a fine book every one of whose commandments Lupton manages to violate -- than from this opus of navel-gazing.
A few concrete things wrong with it: well, the obvious one is that since every design element in this book exists to show itself, the book as a whole is extremely difficult to read. This is exacerbated by bad Index and Table of Contents... the only reason they exist is because they should (sum ergo sum). The fancy rendering of chapters (of which there are three, yes three; moreover they have monosyllabic titles) and sections add to this weird where-am-I-in-the-text effect.
At a graphic design contest level, this might be interesting, but at a "critical guide" level, it is criminal -- worse than type crime. This book suffers from the unpardonable crime of overdesign at any macroscopic level you'd care to think about. Moreover, it simply lacks substance. If a tenth of the time spent typesetting this book had been allocated to actual content, it could have turned out all right. As such, it is full of gloss and color, signifying nothing.
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