Whatever your budget, you will find this book to be a great marketing resource. Includes cost-cutting ideas for using clip art and other graphics and how to save money on printing costs. This is a great book for beginners who don't have a large production budget.

Another good resource for beginners, Desktop Publishing & Design For Dummies shows you how to create effective, desktop-published documents yourself—saving both the time and expense of working with designers, typesetters, and service bureaus. Leading desktop publishing guru and author Roger C. Parker explains how to apply basic design principles while using popular desktop publishing and page layout programs such as QuarkXPress and Adobe PageMaker. He also explains how to choose the right computer hardware and software to suit your budget as well as your needs. You'll learn how to correctly scan photographs, how to choose the best typefaces for headlines, subheads, body copy, and captions, and how to use color properly and effectively.

This is a perfect book for novice and veteran publication designers, explaining the tools best suited to planning, writing, editing, designing, illustrating, producing, and distributing effective and attractive newsletters, using either desk-top or traditional production techniques. Thomas Bivens details the concept of simple, yet effective, design techniques. He discusses the use of fewer typefaces, how to best use and place illustrations, printing in one or two colors, and other techniques that will enhance the quality of your publications.

Graphic Idea Resource: Black-and-White and Two-Color Design—Learn how to keep "artful simplicity" from becoming "awfully boring" when designing in black and white. Gather inspiration from a collection of graphic design work whose grace, strength, and distinction grabs attention without the use of color. Rediscover the power of the grid, the distinction of shapes, and the creative value of designing with black & white.

Parker and Berry first discuss essential design concepts such as relevance, proportion, consistency, contrast, restraint, and attention to detail. Next the authors teach you about basic tools for organizing layouts: grids, columns, gutters, headlines, kickers, captions, bullet lists, and pull quotes, to name a few. They delve into the intricacies of typography and font families, highlighting such concepts as type size, alignment, and leading and kerning. Next you learn about the use of white space and about rulers and accents such as borders, boxes, drop shadows, and bleeds. The authors discuss illustrations, clip art, backgrounds, charts, diagrams, tables, and maps and advise you on positioning those elements on a page. There's also a lot of information on selecting, resizing, and placing photographs. A full-color chapter illustrates how to choose color and use spot color, full color, and duotones.

At this point the authors move from theory to hands-on projects--you apply the design concepts that they have already put forth. You learn about the appropriate design, graphic, and text elements for newsletters, ads, catalogs, and other business correspondence. Each chapter in this section offers plenty of illustrations and ends with a checklist of reminders that you can refer to as you design.

Especially useful are chapter 12, which features common design mistakes along with illustrations and explanations of what's wrong, and chapter 13, which highlights redesigns of poorly produced publications. The latter is a before-and-after glimpse of designs of almost all types of publications, from newsletter to survey. These two chapters drive home succinctly and with great visual impact every point of design that the authors have previously discussed. Finally, the appendix offers extra tips on printing in color, and choosing image databases, paper, and service bureaus.

The authors don't refer to the Windows or Macintosh operating systems or to any software programs. The understanding is that you will learn how to use your software tools elsewhere and consult the book for elements of design. That's a reasonable goal, as the authors maintain a clear, concise tone and offer many tips that are tangential but still relevant to the subject matter. For example, the chapter on type has a short sidebar on the difference between kerning and tracking and a longer sidebar on font substitution. All in all, this book functions well as both a how-to manual for beginning designers and as a design reference for more advanced designers. --Kathleen Caster

This is a great resource for anyone just starting out in the newsletter production field. Barbara Fanson takes you step-by-step, from planning your newsletter, to identifying your audience, to picking the perfect name for your publication. From there, she covers design basics (grids, columns, headers, type faces, color use, graphics, and more). There are also plenty of newsletter samples to help you find the perfect layout for you. There is also a wealth of writing and editing guidance to help the newsletter editor.

The first chapter quizzes readers on mostly technical, basic details of design (like dpi), all of which can be found in Williams's previous publications (for example, The Non-Designer's Design Book). Readers will be dismayed, possibly annoyed, that the quiz answers are not provided. Even if not knowing the answers means that you need remedial help, it feels like a bit of a tease.

The next chapters show how to use stock images, or your own images, to increase the visual impact of your piece (basically through an increase in contrast). The best part of this section, and the book as a whole, is the "before-and-after" approach in the examples; they're like a series of makeovers. The captions effectively describe what was changed in the image, and how it improved the design.

The book applies a similar set of makeovers to various types of design projects: logos, forms, newsletters, tables of contents, etc. In the final section, seven designers, including coauthor Tollett, break down the process that they went through on a job of their own.

Self-taught graphic designers probably would make the best audience for this book, but designers who are of their own "school of thought" might find fault with some of the tenets that are put forth. Graphic design by nature is a subjective enterprise--at the mercy of "styles." What you get in this book is more of a "desktop-publisher style" (many of the drawings are clip art, for example). There's a lack of sophistication in the design of the book, as well as in the illustrations of posters, letterheads, advertisements, and other applications that are used as examples. On the other hand, this same open, naive look gives the book an inviting appeal, and makes it perhaps a bit less daunting than style guides, such as Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, that are intended for die-hard professionals. --Angelynn Grant

Topics covered:

Style advice for design projects, including:

• Logos
• Business cards and letterhead
• Invoices and forms
• Advertising
• Billboards
• Web sites
• Tables of contents and indices
• Newsletters and brochures
• Flyers