“Layout Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Building Pages in Graphic Design” covers the course of building a graphic design layout from conception to completion. It isn’t specific to magazines, business pamphlets, websites, or any specific industry. It simply goes over the process many professionals take to identify client needs, brainstorm ideas, layout imagery, use grids to strengthen various aspects of the layout, the use of typography, etc. Given I’ve never worked in the design field before, it opened my eyes to a lot of the thought process that goes into building a design from scratch.
Up until this point I’ve been doing all of my graphic design with a stream of consciousness process. I don’t think that is bad at all, necessarily, because what I’m doing is just personal work and goofing around at the moment. But I do want to make designs that have a specific purpose. For example, making the viewer feel that a particular website has value and that the brand value is communicated appropriately. If the website is trying to communicate “fashionable” but the design says to the viewer “technology” then the design is failing.
The first half of the book details the thought process that goes into preparing a design for a specific purpose. The second half of the book is filled with examples and analysis of designs that were successful and comments by the designers as to why. Many of the designs are not ones I would want to create myself but reading the artist’s comments does reveal how they were able to create designs that were successful for the industry they were commissioned for. Having an explanation for why certain text is turned sideways and is larger than other text gave me insight not necessarily into how to make something that I like but how to better think about how to design something that carries more meaning.
Like Brian Tracy said in his book on the rules of success, the difference between the professional and amateur is in the amount of preparation the professional does before starting their work. Unsurprisingly that is also true in the graphic design field. I now have a basis for understanding the kinds of things a professional thinks about before starting their design work. I’m obviously no professional but the “Layout Workbook” helped me get a little bit closer.