I think [1] Nigel French’s InDesign Type is one of the best design books of 2006—great knowledge of typography in general, InDesign in particular and well-written to boot. Too bad there’s some errata in unlikely places.

I picked up [2] InDesign Type by Nigel French last May at [3] The InDesign Conference and have been nursing it ever since, reading a few pages here and there in airports, at my desk or in the car. It’s a spectacular book, and one that every print designer working with InDesign should read.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[1] Nigel French is a consultant at IPC Media in London, UK. He teaches in the San Francisco area as well and is a partner at [5] 17 Reasons Design in San Francisco (check out the cool Flash website). What I like about his writing style (and the book in general) is that it’s fairly clear without being too dry, and the information presented here is timeless knowledge about type and the tools we use to make it communicate. A lot of design books out there now are just design candy for designers that are hardly worth the read, or glossy books about the latest Photoshop upgrade—books that will look dated and useless a couple years down the road. Who knows, InDesign may be in the scrap heap in five years (maybe killed by Quark, in an ironic twist perhaps?) but I doubt it. Even so, InDesign Type offers knowledge about type in general that will apply to any application. What’s more, the strides InDesign has made in improving typographic controls will not go away no matter what happens to the applications or the companies that create them. We’re not going back, and this book is the only one I can think of that covers this specific range of typography in such depth.

WHAT’S COVERED

A general overview of what’s covered in InDesign Type:

• Text flow and threading frames
• Type anatomy, classification and readability
• Leading
• Kerning and tracking
• Special characters, spaces and glyphs
• OpenType and its exclusive features
• Aligning type, horizontally and vertically
• Indenting and spacing paragraphs
• Drop caps
• Hyphenation and hyphen types
• Tabs and table layout
• Paragraph and character styles
• Rules, sequential and nested styles
• Setting up a page layout
• Baseline grids and guides
• Text wrap
• Type effects in InDesign

I was really impressed by the sections on styles, special characters, and hyphenation: they really show the subtlety of typographic tools that is available in InDesign. Did you know there are eight different kinds of spaces available in InDesign? It’s hard to know them all, since they’re buried in the Type –> Insert White Space… menu item—but they are there nonetheless, and it’s all laid out in detail in InDesign Type. I also do appreciate the keyboard shortcut tips scattered throughout—they’re nearly impossible to remember, but that’s just because InDesign seems to have twice as many as any other Adobe application!

I can tell that Nigel French is not just knowledgeable but pragmatic, because he uses very good examples to illustrate particular InDesign type tools, and suggests good applications for them in everyday work. Such ideas as using tab leaders for reply forms, alternating strokes and fills for long tables and constructing a line scale on a top layer are all easy-to-create enhancements to our workflows. My favorite is the concept of applying a 16-point Rule Below and 18-point Rule Above to a paragraph, creating a box around text that will increase or decrease in length depending on the length of the text! It’s an ingenious solution for a very simple task. The great books are often the ones that pose elegant solutions to everyday problems.

One more kudos: the design of the book itself is very nice, clean and clear. Charlene Charles-Will and Kim Scott are the interior designers, and I thank them for making an enjoyable read even more enjoyable. It’s the goal of good design to make information as easy to absorb as possible—and they have done a good job with this book. Ironically, Aren Howell’s cover design seems to have undergone a change since I bought my copy of the book: above you’ll see the cover graphic with an orange, informal “A” across the cover. My copy has the “A”, but it’s in a different script typeface. I like mine better; the one above seems too spindly.

MISTAKES

I would have given this book five stars—but there’s mistakes in the book. I’m usually pretty lenient when it comes to little flubs, but InDesign Type has some major errors that drove me batty:

• Figure 7.9 displays examples of (A) swash, (B) non-swash and (C) finial characters. Only examples (A) and (B) are shown. (p. 92)
• Figure 14.1 shows eight examples of paragraph rules applied to text; Figures 14.2 through 14.8 show the settings necessary in the Paragraph Rules dialog box to recreate them. However, that’s only seven settings for eight examples; moreover, they’re mixed around. Figure 14.1.H has no dialog box example, while Figure 14.8 actually corresponds to Figure 14.1.D. (p. 200–201)
• Figure 16.7 shows how the Align to Grid command can be executed from the Control palette; however, the buttons indicated are actually the Bulleted List and Numbered List buttons. FYI: the Align to Grid button is to the left of the Numbered List button, on the other side of readout showing the cursor’s x-location. (p. 232)
• If a subhead is misaligned from the baseline grid by six points, we are told it can be realigned by adding six points of space before the subhead—or four before and two after. The second approach will align subsequent text to the baseline grid but not the subhead. (p. 232)

There’s other minor ones to speak of, but when mistakes are glaring they really become a black eye and it diminishes the book somewhat.

BUYING ADVICE

Go buy it; that’s my advice. The only designer I can think of who doesn’t need this book is a web designer—and even then, InDesign Type may be a good read for them as well. It will show them what they’re missing when all they have to work with is Times New Roman, Verdana and CSS (which still doesn’t offer the typographic control that print designers have enjoyed for decades).

InDesign Type
Nigel French
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: Adobe Press (March 16, 2006)
ISBN: 0321385446