It’s becoming increasingly harder to find good design and publishing books in the bookstores but there are many available elsewhere that can help even the most seasoned professionals. If you need help learning new techniques, or just want to know more about certain procedures, here are brief reviews of several good books to help lead you in the right direction. Several of the books are great to help give your imagination a jump start while others are great references for ongoing projects. To make it easy for you all of these can be ordered through the VUE website. Links for current reviews appear below. Additional books, software and other products can be found on the Shop with VUE page.

If you’ve discovered a book that you think would be a good for other publishers, please send us your short review to publish in future issues of VUEPOINT. You can send the information via email to bookreview@venturalady.com

Title	Author	Review
The Non-Designer’s Type Guide	Robin Williams
PDF with Acrobat 4	Ted Alspach
Looking Good In Print	Roger C. Parker and Patrick Berry
CorelDRAW Art & Artistry	Corel Press
The Non-Designer’s Scan and Print Book	Sandee Cohen and Robin Williams
CorelDRAW Studio Techniques	David Huss and Gary Priester
The PC is Not a Typewriter	Robin Williams
The Desktop Publisher’s Idea Book, 2nd Edition	Chuck Green
The Non-Designer’s Design Book	Robin Williams

The Non-Designer’s Type Guide

Author: Robin Williams
Publisher: Peachpit Press
ISBN: 0-201-35367-9
List price: $24.99
Amazon Price: See Below

Attention to detail, or lack thereof, is one of the things that can give you away when it comes to your publications. A trained eye can often tell if a publication was done by a “professional” or a novice typesetter by the little details. For instance, the use of true open and close quotes is something we all should pay attention to, but are you aware that there are times when a straight quote, or more accurately, an inch mark, should be used—when the text refers to inches, of course. Are you aware that the hyphen should not be used except to join compound words, not to separate thoughts nor to denote duration in time? The hyphen is often misused, but after reading The Non-Designer’s Type Book you won’t have any excuse for using the wrong characters.

This book is full of interesting and valuable facts about typography and the use of correct symbols and characters. The interesting part is the background behind the use of some of the characters used in the past. If you’ve ever read one of Robin Williams other books you’ll know and appreciate her sense of humor which is ever present in this book.

Here are some of the tidbits you’ll get:

• If you really want to use sans serif in your body copy, shorten the line length, add line space, and use a smaller size type than for serif. (page 35)
• If you have an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, type a period after the ellipsis. (page 66)
• Rarely should you use all caps, and never should you underline. NEVER. That’s a law. (page 135)
• Don’t hyphenate headlines. That’s a law. (page 142)

And, there’s so much more. It is suggested you read this book from cover to cover, but if you can’t find time to do that, at least have it nearby and peruse through it often to learn the correct way to typeset. You may not agree with everything Robin has to say, and that’s okay if you have a valid reason other than ignorance of not knowing the right way to do it.

Although this book is not currently stocked, you can purchase by following the link above. It is highly recommended to everyone using Ventura. No matter what your background or how long you’ve used the program you’re sure to learn something that will help make your publications look more professional.