Book Review - The Non-Designer's Design Book

This book had been a long time in my reading list. I've wanted to read The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin P. Williams for few years already. I've read some design books before and customer experiences are also my favorite work subject. Design is such a big part of experiences, that I've wanted to learn much more about that subject for some time.

I had read so many good reviews about the book, that expectations towards the book was high. When I received the book and started scim the book through I was bit amazed. I had imagined it to be somewhat different. I was bit disappointed at first.

When I finally started to read the book, I totally loved it. It went back to the very basics of design. It goes through the basic concepts of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. Understanding and following these basic elements would make many documents and presentations so much better. The best thing is, that book explains all of these with ease and fun.

The later section of the book concentrates on text and fonts. Understanding fonts was really a new thing to me. I do see text differently after reading this book. I've known that there are many different fonts out there, but I haven't really realized how those work together and what is the difference of all those. Now I've scratched the surface on typefaces and I definitely want to learn more.

This book should be mandatory in all the schools, where presentations and documents need to be created. We would have so much more informative and pleasant reading experiences if everyone would have read at least the first part of the book. The fonts section was fun for me, but I can imagine it won't be for everyone.

It was fun, easy and important book to read. I highly recommend this to everyone.
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

You learn less when you are reading with E-reader than with real books

I've always been doubtful with E-Readers. I've tried couple and it's never felt as good as real ones. Now I found out one more reason to keep reading real books. Study revealed that reading with e-readers make you remember less than with normal books.

Here's an daily mail article about it and here's the actual study.

Actual study wasn't at all about e-Readers, but actually about fonts. Fonts that are harder to read like Comic Sans (that one is for all you Comic Sans haters!) and others make people to remember better the actual content of the text. Surprisingly it makes people to less confident that they have learned the content, but actually still people learn better.

It's amazing how our brains and mind works. When reading is harder and you are less confident about your learning, you have learned better. That's a good tip for all book creators. If you want people to remember your thoughts better, you might want to use some bit harder to read font.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen