Content area
Full text
DYNAMICS IN DOCUMENT DESIGN: CREATING TEXTS FOR READERS
Karen A. Schriver. 1997. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. [ISBN 0-47130636-3. 560 pages, including index. $29.95 (softcover).]
Dynamics in document design is a wonderful book. In fact, it is several books in one-part history, part detailed information on typography and layout, part research and theory, part case studies-all presented in beautifully clear writing with lots of illustrative examples.
Karen Schriver starts out by saying, "Many documents fail because they are so ugly that no one will read them or so confusing that no one can understand them. This book aims to help make documents less ugly and less confusing" (p. xxiii). The field she discusses, document design, is the way many of us see technical communication-as the place where good writing and good visual design come together. Writing and design are both critical to creating documents that work. The words and the visual presentation must work together, and both must be selected to serve the purposes, audiences, and media of the particular situation. Whether you come originally from the world of prose or from the world of graphics, you'll find a wealth of interesting, entertaining, and useful information in this book.
Dynamics in document design is not a prescriptive, "how-to" set of guidelines. It is full of good advice, but it is also, at 495 pages before the appendixes, a book to be savored in sections and over time. In Part One, "Situating document design," Schriver first builds a definition of document design with short case studies from real people struggling with real documents. She then traces the evolution of the field since the 1800s, with fascinating stories and pictures, culminating in a 43-page timeline in which she shows, for each decade of this century, what was happening in...