John McWade is a designer’s designer, someone who not only does superb work himself, but has been a teacher and inspiration to many, many others in the years since he became the very first user of the very first desktop publishing software: Pagemaker. I frequently recommend his books, “Before and After: Graphics for Business” and “Before and After: Page Design,” to clients and anyone starting out in the design field. He is also the publisher of Before and After Magazine, one of the finest, certainly the most practical periodical in the field.
This recent post on his blog not only sums up why designers do what we do, but puts our work in a different and thoughtful light; one that it is much too easily missed in our well-fed, computer-aided world.
Page design is important. Recently saw a book that had had an indesign designer – or so she said… but the pages were jammed to the margins – to save money on the number of pages printed I’m sure. It was a shame and totally unnecessary. My hunch is she will get some poor reviews simply because the design is ugly and no one will really recognize why.
That’s sad, but it points up a really important point about these wonderful software tools we all use: knowing design software doesn’t mean you know design, any more than knowing how to use a word processor (or an authoring program) means you know how to write, or having a spiffy digital camera means you know how to compose a great image.