Book Start With A Scan

This “oldie but goodie” book—it was published in 1996—helps us designers see line art and scanned graphics in a whole new way…

This “oldie but goodie” book—it was published in 1996—helps us designers see line art and scanned graphics in a whole new way.

Start with a Scan has been around for ten years now, and I just came across this fine book this year. It’s currently in its second edition but what I found was the first edition, circa 1996—back when scanners were not at every designer’s desk (due to their $500 minimum pricetag) and a thing called the World Wide Web was a novelty to be found in the last pages of any book on graphics. Of course, now things are a teensy bit different—but even with the first edition, Start with a Scan offers some eye-opening tricks with scanned art.

A REMNANT OF DESIGN FROM THE 1990s

It’s very interesting to read a book like this because, though it’s only ten years old, the design of it feels quite dated. I don’t think it’s the design of the book itself—which is clean and well-designed—but the examples, which show a preponderance of serif typefaces, loud color schemes and a general love of collage and thickly-layered Photoshop graphics that seem to be a hallmark of 1990s design due to the PostScript/PageMaker revolution. I’m not bashing the book for this; it’s only an observation. I haven’t seen the second edition but I know it’s from the year 2000 so it will be a lot more pertinent to today’s design scene.

The book begins with an overview of the technology behind scanners. Many scanners out there today still use the same technology from 1996—that is, charge-coupled devices and flatbed scanners. It’s good background knowledge, but a few parts of it are obsolete—such as the prices listed, as well as the mention of handheld scanners, which I don’t think are used at all anymore. The specifications listed are out of date as well, but in most cases scanners of the 1990s as well as those of today work just as well for creative work.

As would be expected, there’s quite a bit of material about Photoshop—including screenshots of dialog boxes and an entire section on Photoshop’s various artistic filters. Fortunately Photoshop never seems to get rid of any features—it just continues to add more and more—so what you read here will still be relevant to CS2 as well as version 5. Even the dialog boxes shown function pretty much the same way they do now (though there are a few that look foreign to me). It is a bit strange to see the old Mac OS 9 style applied to these dialog boxes, but consider it an opportunity to see how far our equipment has come in the past ten years.

BEING CREATIVE WITH LINE ART

What this book really excels at is its creativity with line art and scanned graphics. I especially appreciate the section on textures, because it’s very easy with today’s design tools to ignore texture in favor of flat color when working with page layout applications or even Photoshop. I keep an entire folder of scanned textures, torn paper, and other bits and pieces to create texture in my designs—and Start with a Scan can teach you what to do with them. Especially cool is the section on cloth textures, marbled textures and the how-to on electronically creating a marbled texture. I don’t think it’s quite the same as true marbling—is anything artificial as good as the real thing?—but it’s created from an easy sequence of Photoshop or Painter commands and it’s still a viable technique for today’s Photoshop users.

A section in the back of the book discusses type created with scanned materials, and I think this is a great read. Doesn’t it seem that, years ago, the type we found in advertisements and such were unique and clever? Back then designers often made their own type, simply because they didn’t have Adobe Font Folio to lean on. Nowadays everyone has hundreds or thousands of fonts to use, and we see easily-obtainable typefaces used by even the largest of corporations. How many times have we seen movie posters with Trajan (for the dramatic films) or Gill Sans Extra Bold Display (for the comedy films)? Type isn’t even tweaked much anymore. But read this section of Start with a Scan, and mayble you’ll be creating your own typefaces soon. It’s as easy as scanning in the shapes—whether they’re letterforms, your handwriting or even found objects—and putting them in sequence. If you’re really into creating typefaces, check out Designorati:Typography for a good analysis of typography applications on the market today.

NOT A STEP-BY-STEP BOOK

The last book I reviewed—Photoshop CS2 Gone Wild—was a step-by-step book that unfortunately buried its steps in long paragraphs. Start with a Scan, on the other hand, has a lot of examples in its pages but doesn’t really list the processes step-by-step. The book to me is more of a catalyst, offering ideas and solutions for various problems but not going through all the real-world examples in much detail. There are several examples where a book cover or artwork is explained start-to-finish, but it’s usually seen in the small notes below projects. The main text is reserved for theory, ideas and general details about creating art with scans and line art. Sometimes I wish there was more emphasis added to the steps needed to create some effects.

BUYING ADVICE

I think Start with a Scan is a great book for a designer, especially if you work with Photoshop art, line art such as logos or black-and-white art, or if you tend toward the artistic side. Veteran and/or virtuoso designers will probably find a lot of the ideas in this book to be old hat or no-brainers, having probably done it themselves just because it seemed natural. For that reason I give the book four stars out of five, but if you haven’t done much with scanned art or line art in the past, this book will be a five out of five and I recommend you take a look.