Book Review: The Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book (works with CS5)

Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book, The (8th Edition)

What's Good: A large book filled with many detailed tutorials. DVD included has tutorial files, layer styles, patterns, custom tools and other useful tools.

What's Bad: Visuals are small thumbnails. Not ideal for beginners.

Verdict: Clunky navigation and inconsistent visuals don't prevent the detailed content from hitting the mark. A great book for day to day reference on very commonly used effects.

Full Text Review

Do you need to apply an image to a texture surface? Have a design concept that includes styling photos into a vintage, old time look? Or just need to tweak the lighting for a photo? These are the kind of day to day problems that the can be solved by The Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book by Linnea Dayton and Cristen Gillespie.

The massive book is broken into 11 sections starting with "Fundamentals of Photoshop" and "Photo Skills", diving into specific sections of tips and tricks and moving into a chapter on "Putting it All Together".

The first chapters ease you into Photoshop with an introduction to the program and its tools. There are better books for beginners, however, so if you have this book you probably know quite a bit. The essential skills discussed includes many new features that are new in these versions. The book also touts that it will work with CS5 so you'll be ahead of the game if you brush up on smart objects, filters and some of the newer selection tools.

The next third of the book is about enhancing photography. This isn't yet the "Wow" set of tutorials you'd expect from the book title. These are a great reference, however, for day to day photography or design work. In depth discussion on fixing common photo problems, such as an overdetailed background, the content aware scale feature to independently move a photo's background, and toning effects.

The painting section is when the magic starts to happen. Some very impressive and convincing art techniques are discussed and the examples are inspiring for a designer. I only wish that the book would take advantage of it's space and show larger more eye catching images. Tutorials are easily missed in the large walls of text without an image to draw you in. The "Wet on Wet" Acrylics is one of my favorites as it shows a fairly convincing painting technique. The pastel and chalk tutorials are pretty nice as well. Illustrators will be interested in the real life examples of artists using Photoshop to create works and the detailed text describing how they did it.

The clip art effects section looks either dated or amateurish. The techniques behind them are probably useful, but the examples don't look like anything I could imagine being in a real design. This is a set of chapters dealing with using vector graphics and applying effects to them. We don't arrive to the eye candy again until the second half of the type and graphics section which again reviews over illustrators discussing their works and the effects they use.

Finally, we reach the section that puts it all together. It's some of the standard tattoo and object mapping that you'd hope for in any of these books. The info graphics discus using the photomerge techniques to create a panorama. It's pretty informative and explains the concept well. There are tutorials on mapping objects in perspective which you can imagine using to mock up a banner or signage in a photo.

Largely, these book ends up being more of a reference than anything you'd expect to read from cover to cover. The navigation of the book is a bit clunky in that case, but the content is there and if you like what you've read, it's definitely worth it's price.

This post is part of an ongoing series of book reviews. To suggest a book for review, send a message via twitter @sketchee or leave a comment.

Book Review: Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook

Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook: 53 Easy-to-Follow Recipes for Digital Photographers, Designers, and Artists

What's Good: Very useful and utilitzarian effects. Nice "Tip" boxes scattered throughout

What's Bad: Busy layout, some examples aren't very inspiring

Verdict: While the book doesn't show off the effects like you might expect, there are some really useful tips and tutorials

Full Text Review

While you can spend a ton of time looking online for the latest photoshop tutorial, sometimes it's nice to have a few cool ones on hand. So something like the Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook sounds like a good idea. The book starts with an introduction which covers many of the improvements added in CS3 as well as an overview of the Photoshop tools you'll need to be familiar with throughout the book. It's broken up into "Tonal and Color", "Graphic Art Effects", "Lighting Effects", "Natural World Effects, "Traditional Photographic Effects", "Distortion Effects", "Texture Effections" "Presentation Effects" plus a Glossary

The book is a collection of tutuorials all of which are useful, even if some of the examples aren't pretty to look at. Don't you want to look at the final product and think, "I want to do THAT!" (like on abduzeedo.com which has some stunning tutorials, in my humble opinion) The halftone effect is often used to really cool effects, but the "psychedlic poster effect" tutorial has a pretty silly looking final result that is more like a powerpoint presentation. The books cover shows some of the mediocre examples. Still, the effects are useful and in the right hands would be pretty spectacular.

The tutorial for converting color into black and white is a pretty simple tutorial. The author stresses the importance of not losing the dynamic range. Many pages have a "tip" box related to the "recipe". These are the kind of thoughtful ideas that make the book worth it. Overall, you have a collection of useful concepts and the examples are just ways of teaching the techniques. Your imagination will be required to make them actually useful. They are explained in a detailed step by step fashion. Most importantly, they tell you why you're using these. So you can improve or change the idea presented with that understanding. These aren't just techniques that you would have to always reproduce exactly as shown in the book to ever even use.

The graphic arts section has some really nice end products, some of the best in the book, including Warholing and watercolor. These are very convincing as are many of the lighting effects. The neon sign effect is one of the coolest ones. If you visit the Amazon link and look at the back cover and excerpts you can see more examples.

The nature and world effects will show you how to change the seasons: make leaves change to autumn, rainfall on a sunny day, rainbows, waterdroplets, lightning, snow in the summer. Many of these are really well executed and all are easy enough to follow.

The traditional photographic effects have very interesting introductory paragraphs for each "recipe" explaining how film grain, tinting or whatever it may be would have been done in traditional equipment. This really sets you up to understand what you are trying to reproduce.

The distortion effects will help you do things like clone with perspective, turn a photo into a caricature or add a tattoo. These aren't tutorials that I would use too often, but there aren't many of them anyway. The texture effects are a bit flat. I would have expected more distortion maps which are so easy to use and add a lot of depth and realism. I don't think there were any used however. Flat layer effects seemed to be more favored. That's kind of weird.

If many of these effects sound like ones you might use, then it isn't a bad book to keep hand. I know that there are a lot of really great tutorials on the web, but sometimes it's nice to have a book compiled with consistent quality. This book might fit that need for many readers.

You can visit the author's website at TimShelbourne.co.uk.

This post is part of an ongoing series of book reviews. To suggest a book for review, send a message via twitter @sketchee

15 Paths to More Sustainable and More Green Graphic Design

Graphic designers can help apply the principles of efficiency and waste reduction in our industry. This can save us money and time if we're creative about it.

photo credit: jessicareeder

After watching The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard, I'm just beginning to understand the meaning of sustainability. Recycling works and buying recycled goods helps because there is only so much space on the earth to put all the trashed plastic so we might as well put it back in our stores. That principle might be applied to all kinds of things and on this page I've looked for an answer to how the graphic arts fits in. While I'm still not totally convinced that all of these methods are viable for everyone, but it's still an interesting discussion.

If there is something you're doing to be more efficient and less wasteful with your design, share a comment.

Books

Green Graphic Design

Green Graphic Design by Brian Dougherty and Celery Design Collaborative is a book explaining how to make every step of the design and production process a little greener: paper, printing, binding, shipping, packaging.

SustainAble: A Handbook of Materials and Applications for Graphic Designers and Their Clients (Design Field Guide)

SustainAble by Aaris Sherin aims to educate on sustainable applications and tackle sustainability in paper, printing, formats, materials, inks, and practice.

Packaging Sustainability: Tools, Systems and Strategies for Innovative Package Design

Packaging Sustainability by Wendy Jedlicka talks about making effective packaging that is minimal eco-impact.

Design for Sustainability: A Sourcebook of Integrated, Eco-logical Solutions

Design for Sustainability: A Sourcebook of Integrated, Eco-logical Solutions by Janis Birkeland takes design to every level covering specifics in industrial design, materials, housing design, urban planning and transport, landscape and agriculture, and energy and resource use.

Articles

Kirsti Scott talks about Sustainable Graphic Design on the Hot Design Blog. She argues for more efficient practices, working from home to reduce travel, using only recycled or bamboo papers and even using fonts that use less ink.

The Green Resource Guide tells us the story behind Green Signage in Produce. There are great photos showing how the reclaimed items factor into the farmer's market look of a grocery store.

In "Making Sense Of It All: How to Promote Your Brand While Staying Sustainable", Delia Bonfilio of Fast Company talks about the challenge of balancing environmental ideals with business realities.

Paragon Muse talks about implementing some green practices in their post Joining the BandWagon: Sustainable Design. They are promoting recycled papers to their clients. They have redesigned their business cards with tree free paper and use only soy-based inks. They make some great points: the need for actionable ideas, more education and spreading the word.

"Tips: Sustainable Graphic Design" by Metropolitan Group gives us a number of ways to ease our impact by requesting biodegradable elements from others in the chain, creating multi-use products, using designs that require less white space (less paper), targeted mailing (instead of blind mass market mailing) and other ideas.

In "Sustainable Graphic Design in Malawi" by Jesse Rankin, we're asked "how can graphic design actually help Malawi in the development process to becoming a self sustaining country?" and given some very powerful answers.

"Sustainable Design" from Drawing on Experience gives us 10 Best Practices for Sustainable Design.

More Resources

Renourish is a sustainability toolkit. Great way to start getting things in motion in your production process.

Lovely as a Tree wants to tell you everything about environmentally aware graphic design with tips about paper choice, printing considerations, case studies and a database of printers and paper sources in the UK.

Design Can Change is a pretty website with a message: you as a designer can help.

AIGA Center for Sustainable Design has more case studies, interviews, and resources.

Book Review: Thinking with Type

Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)

What's Good: History and practical information weaved together seamlessly, nice design and layout, entertaining

What's Bad: A bit short

Verdict: A great primer for learning how to look at type and how to choose and format typography. Not definitive, but a worthy handbook of the larger typographic discussion.

Full Text Review

Design isn't just about how things look, the answer to a design challenge is more about discovering why certain things work. In steering projects toward visual solutions that deliver clear messages, we have to look at the very building blocks of design. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students aims to get at the heart of this issue. If the cover seems familiar it might be because I mentioned this book before in my article Gifts for Graphic Designers: A Wish List, but it's time for a more thorough review. The book's aim is to be as practical as possible while providing a logical and historical foundation. It's a field guide for professionals to deal with type. This book comes from Ellen Lupton, a professor at my home state's Maryland Institute College of Art.

Choosing type isn't just about whim or feeling. This book deconstructs type into basic elements helping you make informed design decisions. The book is divided into three sections: Letter, Text and Grid plus an appendix of definitions, hints and warnings. History is weaved between practical information in a way that is more narrative and entertaining than the typically dry text book lesson. In one moment you're reading about the purpose of body text; the author switches abruptly into the history of written manuscripts. In a short few paragraphs we're in the digital age of dynamic text. In talking about spacing, the history of written type translated onto evenly made printing blocks is transformed into the modern purpose of controlling visual space in body copy. The sections might be considered essays more than a longer narrative, which makes for an easy read.

The examples are as integral to the book's narrative as the history itself. The design of the pages often split the text liberally with examples. The layout of the book has great play with type itself. When is justified text good or bad? The answers are stated with justified text. Makes sense. Many of the other examples are just fun type tricks and explainations on when and why they work or don't.

Effectively conveyed is type styles' effectiveness in different mediums. Helvetica is a font designed for print, Verdana works well for web. The writer doesn't just force you to memorize this kind of information, but instead she explains why. So you can look at type with fresh eyes and see that Verdana's large x-height and simple curves work well for the pixel display of the computer system. The layout grid is discussed like most things, with it's origin with printing press. The focus is clearly intended to steer the reader into the uses of the modern grid in magazine, book and web design.

There are some negatives. Purposefully functional,the history isn't fully explored. It's the backdrop for basing modern uses of type. The essay format drives the points forward and then simply moves on. This is possibly ideal for the busy modern pros that the book must be aimed to, but for those looking for a long form and in-depth view you'll have to go elsewhere. The modern model of dynamic typography that changes with context is in full effect and some readers might not like some of the more magazine styled layouts.

I suspect that the average reader will learn a lot from this text. It can serve as a good guide during the design process. The short page count of the book can be seen as a much appreciated conciseness. The format is almost web-like in it's sections and pieces which appeals to a young and tech-savvy designer such as myself. Will the average writer or editor appreciate this information as much? Perhaps not. It may not be what everyone is looking for, but it will appeal to many design professionals who need a quick reference and crash course.

Excerpts of Thinking with Type are available online at thinkingwithtype.com

This post is part of an ongoing series of book reviews. To suggest a book for review, send a message via twitter @sketchee

Drawing: Space, Form, & Expression

Thought I'd put up another book recommendation entry. Drawing: Space, Form, & Expression is a really good book that helps to expand your artis's creativity. It quickly runs through the basics but doesn't babysit you. It just tells you simply to draw and the general approaches and then let's you explore.

Too many drawing books are overly simplified tutorials that want to break down every stuff of drawing every object. While those books have their place, this one gives you the approach to being the one to discover how to create these things on your own. Learn how to view the world and you can pretty much draw everything. There are lots of excercises to help you explore the space on your paper and it's really just fun to go through. There are some great excercises about drawing from your imagination and turning it into something tangible

The book ends with a portfolio of contemporary and student drawings that explore the principles that you've learned throughout the text. Definitely one to check out, read through and follow.