1000 Type Treatments
Article by Martin Gibson – Twitter: @martingibson @embody3d – 19.11.2011
ISBN – 9781592534821
1000 Type Treatments – From Script to Serif, Letterforms Used to Perfection by Wilson Harvey/Loewy and published by Rockport
The best way to describe 1000 type treatments is that it is a book about standard font manipulation. That is, you have a whole great selection of free and premium fonts in your design program like Adobe Illustrator, now how can you make these fonts dazzle and create interest for your desired project.
The book is split up into the following chapters: Flyers + Leaflets, Books + Magazines, Logos + Stationary, Brochures, Posters + Banners and 3D + Outdoor + Digital.
1000 Type Treatments – From Script to Serif, Letterforms Used to Perfection by Wilson Harvey/Loewy and published by Rockport is an inspiration book featuring hundreds of designs from all around the world. The book never aims to educate you on the process of font manipulation but rather give you ideas for your next design project.
All the designs are beautifully designed and presented as either vectors or as in-context photographs. The amount of designs for each section is just about right giving you enough projects to keep it weighty yet it doesn’t overburden you with inspiration and ideas (which actually can be bad). The designs include your typical grunge, minimalist, colourful, greyscale, ultra-modern, consistent, random, contrast, blended, photographic, vector, playful, scary and bold variety and tones.
For each design image it shows the country of origin and the design firm responsible for the work.
The small pages both have are a positive and a negative. Positive in that it is a cute little reference book to show clients. The obvious downside however is that all the images are small, especially when you divide half of the pages into quadrant images. But for anyone with youthful eyes like myself I am sure this will not be an issue.
There is no doubt the designs are excellent, but it just seems to lack creativity or any kind of distinction from many of the other portfolio books we receive. What’s the point of creating a book, a piece of art, a movie, a product when it doesn’t add anything new or unique to the genre? The only thing unique about Type Treatments is its title, in reality however this book is a polished typical portfolio book. The title brings connotations of surgical precision, unknown methodologies but all you will get are great images and inspiration. The term ‘type treatments’ also suggests it is concerning inner font manipulation, that is, how to edit fonts in a designerly manner to create something new. However 1000 Type Treatments also shows layout changes of fonts, so it shows a standard font at a 90 angle, or the structure is disjointed just to mention a few. Because of this open scope there is nothing that separates these portfolio items from any other design book. I guess an advantage of 1000 Type Treatments is that it houses all these project portfolios of different categories like logos, brochures etc. under one compact roof. 1000 Type Treatments isn’t bad, but nothing new.
[rating:3]
