Reddit reviews The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design (Classic Typography Series)
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design (Classic Typography Series). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
These are mostly directed at classical book design, so they probably tend more conservative than you should do for a magazine, but these books actual spell out rules for what you should do (I'm a big believer in handcuffing yourself to rules for the purpose of understanding them, and then breaking them later), which is I think what you're asking for.
My sorta summary/advice based heavily on what I read in the above books:
Don't decorate; be confident. There's definitely an urge to add little horizontal rules above things or boxes around page elements. Tischichold especially points out how young designers can't help but put a thin box around the inside title page of books. He says it shows a lack of confidence. The solution is to have a justification for where you put things.
Basically, if you have a baseline grid for the page, then you can place page elements on it and know that they will be harmonic with the overall page.
Page numbers can honestly go anywhere as long as it's not the inside edge. Putting them there means the publication has to be completely open in order to use the page numbers, which is annoying.
Don't put repeating information on pages. It's annoying to have the author's name or the book title at the top of every single page. Again, this is a demonstration of a lack of confidence. I believe the thinking is that if the pages are photocopied and distributed, then people will know where it came from. DRM annoys.
Usually the font size for notes will be smaller than the main text, so keep aware of the leading difference between the two, especially if you put notes along the side. The leading shouldn't necessarily be equal, but it should be a multiple of the main content, so that every three or four lines the text aligns again.
I hope none of that was totally irrelevant to your project :) Good luck!
Check out The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design (Classic Typography Series) by Jan Tschichold. A curmudgeon from the old school, these are the rules you should know if you want to break them. I had no idea this book was so expensive though: $58.98 used!
Love the Layout Book. Also your namesake's Form of the Book is excellent and beautiful.
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>You seem to be entirely ignoring that he didn't just like the golden ratio or think about it a lot, he blatantly incorporated it into his designs. This is the only bit that matters... he very clearly and obviously used it in many of his designs, which are considered to be of great beauty.
I know that he used the golden ratio. I never tried to deny that. But I completely disagree when you say that it matters. And especially if you think that it's the most important thing.
I ignored it because it has nothing to do with merit in my mind. Use of something by a famous person doesn't give it merit.
As an example, da Vinci experimented with materials. He wanted to use a different kind of paint that was oil-based instead of using fresco, painting on wet plaster. He wanted a medium that would let him layer on paint when it was dry. He flatly refused to paint frescoes. His experiments were extremely unsuccessful.
He never bothered to test his paints out before using them in large scale works of art. He abandoned works because they began to deteriorate while he was still painting them. Worse than that, he continued to use his experimental materials even after repeated failures. Look at how badly his The Last Supper has deteriorated. It probably looked even worse than that when he was still alive. That is after multiple restorations (but before the most recent restoration). It's a complete mess of cracks and missing pieces.
His Mona Lisa suffers as well from his experiments. He used wax in his paint and experimental varnish. It began to crack, fade, yellow, and darken almost immediately. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, look at the difference in damage and color between his Mona Lisa, and the one supposedly done by a student sitting next to him: Mona Lisa vs Museo del Prado Mona Lisa. I'm not trying to say they should have looked exactly the same, because the original has been exposed to more of the elements. But the damage is far more extensive than if he had just used normal materials.
So should we admire da Vinci's experimental mind? His wanting to try something new to bring the art he had in his head into reality? Of course. Without experimenting, we'd have have no progress.
But should we admire his methods, or his refusal to use proper tools? Should we say that his paints and varnishes had merit? No! He made a mistake. Many mistakes. He was stubborn and foolish, and his great works of art suffered.
Le Corbusier using the golden ratio is not nearly as bad as that. His buildings haven't toppled because of the golden ratio. But just because a famous artist does something does NOT give it merit. Just because they do something doesn't make it significant. It could be that they're just doing things because they're set in their ways and stubborn as a donkey.
I'm not even trying to say that Le Corbusier's designs are bad. But if what you said were true. If picking a number and "blatantly incorporating it into your design" were all that mattered, then an artist could pick ANY number and do that. If so then everything has merit. So what's the point of saying that? Everything is the same then.
>Oh come on, that's written by some editor trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Nearly all blurbs on the back of a book are stupid, and don't always give a reasonable insight into what the actual text is like.
The editor will also tailor the blurb towards the target audience. It's pretty clear that one is aimed at the nutjob crowd. So my pointing it out has more to do with why you would even link it to me in the first place. You complained before that I used that guy's blog as a source when talking about it, but then you suggest that I'm going to find scholarly notes in that book? Read through the "look inside". It's a practical guide on how to wave your hands and create art with the golden ratio.
>As far as proof, I don't know what you expect. In fact I'm sure you know that there isn't any "proof" because, what exactly am I trying to prove here?
You said that the Modernists cared where Modulor came from, and you said they cared about the golden ratio. Where are you getting that from? Where's your proof?
I want proof that any artist ever said that they used the golden ratio for a reason. Anything to show that the golden ratio has more merit than any random number.
You called that blogger a nutjob so I think you agree with me that some people take it too far. So when we get somebody like Le Corbusier it should be worth reading. Instead he talks about it in relation to music and then states in his words that his "scale" is based on "harmony" and using an arbitrary height as the basis for human beauty, and by extension the beauty in his architecture.
We have all these fake blog examples and then we get to a real example from a respected artist and his explanation is so incredibly stupid. Doesn't that bother you?
He could have picked a random number (well actually he did) and it would have been just as good, as long as he planned out his system with as much care. That's why I'm saying it's not the golden ratio that matters at all, it's what he did with his system that matters. Why the golden ratio? Why not pi, or tau, or e, or 5.2987, or 40?
If you take any graphic design class they will probably teach you about using a grid system. But there are so many different grid systems, it becomes completely silly. Proponents point to this example or that to show what makes it look beautiful. But it really doesn't matter which grid you use. What matters is that after you create a draft, you look at your work and fix things that look wrong to you, and that you make things consistent. Anyone who spends their time looking at art or design will be able to tell instantly if a page layout looks good or not. You don't need a ratio telling you where to place your gutters. Just as a photographer or art director doesn't use the rule of thirds to tell if a photo looks right or if it should be cropped.
Jan Tschichold came up with one such grid system in which he favored "natural" and "intentional" numbers like the golden ratio. He said that if a designer accidentally used one of those special numbers, that it was "unintentional" and therefor bad design. Even if the intentional design was exactly the same as the unintentional one. I find that line of reasoning idiotic.
>That the golden section is a geometric ratio which people tend to find innately pleasing? This is plainly unprovable. How could I possibly begin to prove such a thing?
How can you say that something is innately pleasing as a fact if you don't have anything at all to back it up? Did you read that on a blog or something? You say it as if it's common knowledge.
This is talked about in the book I link further down.
>I'm pretty sure you know that absence of evidence isn't the same thing as evidence.
The book tries to be a summary of all that is important in art history. You're right that absence of mentioning the golden doesn't prove that it has no merit at all. But the implications are that it's not important. It's in it's 14th (?) edition now, they've had plenty of chances to fill any holes in their coverage. And that's a hell of a lot more telling than your book link, so I wouldn't throw stones about this one if I were you.
>I was asking you for a scholarly work which argues against it, not one which ignores it.
You said my arguments were not "solid", but I never saw you ask for anything scholarly, even when I asked you for that exact thing. Considering you didn't even read the book you linked to me, I didn't even think about linking you any books. But I have some:
Mario Livio wrote a book about the history of the golden ratio. It's the only one I know of that talks at any length about the history of reasoning. He talks a lot about the history of math. He talks about where the golden ratio was and wasn't used. He makes several attempts to debunk various theories about artists who did or didn't use the golden ratio. Not all his arguments are perfect, but he's basically talking about pattern recognition and forms of apophenia. Then he talks about scientific and psychological studies about the golden ratio, their findings, flaws, and merits. And then he takes a strange turn and talks about God, evolution, mathematics, and philosophy. Here is a short article by the author: http://plus.maths.org/content/golden-ratio-and-aesthetics
If you want to learn about grid systems in graphic design and proofs of why Jan Tschichold is an idiot, read The Form of the Book by Jan Tschichold.
Prove me wrong, but you'll never link me anything worth reading because there's a problem for both of us. There are very few scholarly papers or books written about the golden ratio, whether for or against it. You said you don't think it's a fringe theory, but that's exactly how it's seen in the art history / art theory world. That doesn't prove that it has no merit, that's just my understanding of the situation. So there's little reason for any contemporary art historian to talk about it. There's not much incentive for anyone to argue against it, and it would take a very convincing paper or book to break through all the bullshit on blogs to get any art historian to change their mind in favor of it.