Designer's Lexicon: The Essential Illustrated Dictionary of Design, Print and Computer Terms Book

Alistair Campbell is well known to professional designers as the author of The Designer's Handbook. In the days of Cow Gum, type depth scales and Letraset rub-down transfers, the Handbook explained how your sticky collage glorified by the name of artwork got turned, by other people, into the real thing. As Campbell accurately notes in his introduction to The Designer's Lexicon, in the digital world designers are increasingly responsible for all aspects of the process. A much greater knowledge both of traditional design arts and digital technology is required. "The 'man who does' is becoming increasingly elusive and, as if our heads aren't crammed full enough with the nomenclature of our profession ... completely new things are being chucked at us at every turn...".The book is divided into two sections--an alphabetical index or "wordfinder" and the lexicon itself, which, subdivided into nine categories, loosely groups collections of like terms. This approach works well if you have no idea about the word you're looking for, only that it means, say, a typesetting style where successive lines are progressively indented at both ends, forming the shape of an inverted triangle. Entry number 1868 "in pendentive" in the Typography section--alongside hanging indent, hook in, half-measure and lacuna--might be what you're looking for. Grouping definitions in this way means you can read around a definition in a manner not possible with an alphabetically ordered list so that the lexicon is much more readable than a conventional dictionary. An initial foray into Moire, for example, provides on the same page a plethora of related definitions including mechanical tint, mezzograph, midtone dot rescreened halftone and screen frequency. It can't be an easy task to produce a lexicon that's comprehensive, authoritative and a good read, but Alistair Campbell has succeeded.--Ken McMahonRead More