Graphic Design: A User’s Man­ual writ­ten and designed by Adrian Shaugh­nessy is an absolute must read for a graphic designer. Actu­ally, I should rephrase that, this book is an absolute must-reference for any designer. Struc­tured as a very con­cise ref­er­ence tool with each chap­ter, titled sim­ply with a let­ter of the alpha­bet, address­ing com­mon and not so com­mon top­ics in the design world.

If you’re any­thing like me when flip­ping through a new book, regard­less of it’s topic there has to be plenty of visual stim­u­la­tion and an equal amount of brain bend­ing insight pulled from the text to sum­ma­rize what I’m about to read (or sum­ming up what I just read).

Motion Design — Most stu­dents emerge from design school with the abil­ity to make images and text move. Inex­pen­sive soft­ware enables any­one to pro­duce mov­ing image sequences, but it takes more than soft­ware to cre­ate con­vinc­ing motion

This tool func­tions per­fectly as an every­day ref­er­ence and is equally valu­able as a cover to cover read. I’ll be hon­est, I received my copy sev­eral months ago and have delayed post­ing my review so that I could give the book a once over from cover to cover. I will admit, at just over 300 pages or con­tent (excluded the fore­ward by Michael Bierut) there is a lot to digest but all highly infor­ma­tive and all pre­sented in a man­ner that is eas­ily digested.

A very small sam­ple of topics:

• Acces­si­bil­ity
• Blogs
• Com­mis­sion­ing Creatives
• Design books
• Empa­thy
• Find­ing a First Job
• Green­wash­ing
• Hel­vetica
• In-House Work­ing
• Ital­ics and Obliques
• Japan­ese Design
• Kitsch
• Look and Feel
• Mod­ernism

If you’re a self starter, a free­lancer, a career designer or just want an insight­ful per­spec­tive into cur­rent prac­tices of the graphic design indus­try… Graphic Design: A User’s Man­ual absolutely lives up to it’s title and then some, this user’s man­ual belongs on your desk!

Learn more about the author, Adrian Shaugh­nessy at his web­site thisisrealart.com

Tech­ni­cal:

Graphic Design: A User’s Man­ual by Adrian Shaugh­nessy
Pub­lished by Lau­rence King Pub­lish­ing, 2009

Dis­claimer: Pur­chas­ing the book from ama­zon using any link con­tained in this arti­cle will result in me being paid a small comm­sion. If you found the arti­cle help­ful, please show your support!