A series of critical essays and insights about graphic design and typography.

Who cares about commas, semicolons, dashes, and hyphens? Well, you should. A misplaced punctuation mark can confuse physicians and surgeons, cause thousands of dollars in legal fees, misinform judges, puzzle bankers, misguide stockbrokers and create lumps in your pudding. You dont need a teacher with a mouthful of jargon to help you understand how to make yourself clearly understood. Better Punctuation in 30 Minutes a Day will help you teach yourself.

For anyone who has a say in what appears in print and need to know whether, as well as looking good, it will do its job by being read. It gives practical answers on choosing the right typeface, on colour, tints, and many basic aspects of layout.

More Than Sixty Course Syllabi That Bring the New Complexity of Graphic Design to Light All graphic designers teach, yet not all graphic designers are teachers. Teaching is a special skill requiring talent, instinct, passion, and organization. But while talent, instinct, and passion are inherent, organization must be acquired and can usually be found in a syllabus. Teaching Graphic Design, Second Edition, contains syllabi that are for all practicing designers and design educators who want to enhance their teaching skills and learn how experienced instructors and professors teach varied tools and impart the knowledge needed to be a designer in the current environment. This second edition is newly revised to include more than thirty new syllabi by a wide range of professional teachers and teaching professionals who address the most current concerns of the graphic design industry, including product, strategic, entrepreneurial, and data design as well as the classic image, type, and layout disciplines. Some of the new syllabi included are: Expressive Typography Designer as Image Maker Emerging Media Production Branding Corporate Design Graphic Design and Visual Culture Impact! Design for Social Change And many more Beginning with first through fourth year of undergraduate courses and ending with a sampling of graduate school course options, Teaching Graphic Design, Second Edition, is the most comprehensive collection of courses for graphic designers of all levels.

The proliferation of desktop publishing has reawakened interest in the presentational aspects of printed communication; that is, in what writing looks like. When picking a fonts package, the image-conscious self-expresser would do well to consult Wheildon on the ins and outs of typography and graphic design; indeed, for those in advertising, his book will serve as a layout primer. In measured, detailed language, and drawing on nine years of research, Wheildon discusses page layout, typefaces, reader behavior, and more. Further, given subject matter that lends itself to insightful illustration, he accompanies the text with graphics that enhance and underscore his points at every turn. His writing seems a bit technical, even dry, at first, but detailed and crisp exposition combine with apt illustration to impart as much depth about the technical aspects of presenting printed communication as many readers may want. Mike Tribby. --

The articles in this special issue tackle the earliest stages of the reading process. The first three articles address issues of letter perception: i.e. how letter representations are activated from their visual features. The remaining four articles address the nature of the letter representations themselves, from functional, developmental and neural perspectives. These articles introduce novel and interesting ways to investigate the very earliest stages of the reading process. The research reported here will stimulate future investigations of this highly tractable, yet long overlooked, area of reading research.

The Aspiring Thinker’s Guide to Critical Thinking introduces concepts and strategies for developing essential reasoning skills and intellectual character. As students advance in their academic studies and encounter new situations in their lives, they must learn to differentiate fact from fiction and make decisions based in good reasoning. They must learn to be clear, accurate, relevant, logical, and fair when expressing ideas. This book lays out a clear framework for guiding this development and encouraging lifelong intellectual curiosity. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fairminded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.