Book Review: Mastering Layout: On the Art of Eye Appeal

Mastering Layout: On the Art of Eye Appeal
by Mike Stevens

This book for the most part does what it claims to. It helps the reader design better. The focus is on signs although readers will also find it useful for business cards, posters, anything that involves type. I found it useful in that the author breaks things down into smaller topics. For instance, the author claims you must decide what is the most important part of sign and that should be read first, but you simply can’t just put giant capital letters for this purpose. Naturally the author explains why that is not very effective with some decent visual aides. The book focuses mainly on type only and it is all in black in white. He does try to talk about color but it seems kind of silly only because the entire book is printed in grayscale.