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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0304355054 ISBN 13: 9780304355051

Publisher: Cassell Illustrated, 2000

Synopsis

The days when all a designer needed was a layout pad and markers are long gone. The rapid advance of technology has bought with it a sea of jargon and technical terms. This reference contains over 4000 definitions, covering everything from traditional typesetting and prepress terms to explanations of modern multimedia and web language. Entries are accompanied by explanatory diagrams and illustrations.

About this title

Review

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 McMahon

Edition details

• Publisher: Cassell Illustrated
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0304355054
• ISBN 13: 9780304355051
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Campbell Alastair