Digital Type Design Guide: The Page Designer's Guide to Working With Type

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Summary: This is a high quality book on typography and a great value!
Review: As a college professor who has taught typography for the past 12 years, I have been waiting for a book & CD like this. The type history, technique tutorials, font handling tips and specimens are good overviews for my students and the font library is great. These fonts are good quality, and better yet, the CD contains both IBM & Mac in two formats for cross platform work. This is a good complete font library for beginners who are stuck using that long list of bad novelty display fonts which loaded with a word processing program. Also, any outdated info in the technical section (re: versions of software) is updated on the author's website.

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Summary: At last! A top-notch guide to digital fonts.
Review: Having taught a course in digital fonts management for a university extension graphic design program, I've often been asked to recommend a book on the use and understanding of digital fonts. Frustratingly enough, there hasn't been one--till now. The first third of Sean Cavanaugh's Digital Type Design Guide provides a thorough, accurate, understandable explanation of the technical and stylistic issues; the balance of the book deals with type in design. The cross-platform character charts on pages 68 and 69 are, by themselves, worth the price of the book. The book is well-written, easy to understand, and includes a ton of Macintosh and Windows fonts on an enclosed CD-ROM

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Summary: Mediorcre book with inflated reviews.
Review: I hate when there are nothing but overly-ecstatic reviews for a particular book. You should be skeptical too. The first few chapters of this book are a good reference for designers who have little experience working with type on computers. There is also a chapter on "The Rules of Digital Typography" that offers a great deal of help for the novice, but will nauseate the experienced. It contains a chapter on creating juvenile Photoshop treatments such as "Type in flames." 100 out of the 271 pages of this book are spec sheets for the imitation fonts included with the CD. The overall design of the book is substandard for a design book. Overall, the book is a good resource for those who lack fundamental graphic design education (which includes typography), but of little use to the experienced designer.

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Summary: Excellent advice and a fine collection of fonts
Review: I'm only giving this excellent book a four star rating as it was published in 1995, so some of the information about using software to manage fonts and compose text is out of date, and although there is a chapter on e-mail, there's nothing on the WWW. However, this is only a small fraction of the body of this very valuable book. In addition to being an outstanding and clearly explained guide to typography, the companion CD contains a very superior and diversified collection of finely executed fonts. I've been using them professionally and personally since I first acquired a copy when the book was published.

Both the book and the fonts are well worth the investment. I hope this fine volume will be updated.

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Summary: About the CD...
Review: The book is bundled with a hybrid CD-ROM containing 220 PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts for Macs and PCs. Not shareware fonts, but professional quality typefaces licensed from SoftMaker and URW. There's a cover blurb from John C Dvorak mentioning that "the CD alone is worth much more than the cover price." The bulk of the collection is devoted to text faces (Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon, et al.), but there are also a number of script and display faces

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Summary: A stunningly beautiful book about fonts.
Review: This book contains all sorts of great information about fonts. As a bonus, the book design is gorgeous and the book comes with some wonderful fonts on CD-ROM. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in design and typography, especially those who strive to put a slightly higher level of quality and detail into their work.

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Summary: Should be called the digital type bible
Review: This is the best treatment of digital typography I've ever seen. Sean has not only addressed both technical and aesthetic issues, he has done it in a refreshing and witty tone that had me laughing out loud. Unlike many computer graphic design books on the market today, this one is NOT written for Mac users only; PC users will find this book immensely helpful in dealing with cross-platform problems that crop up when dealing with service bureaus. I consider this my most valuable reference book. With its wealth of technical info, beautiful typography, and solid design technique--not to mention the CD-ROM full of fonts!--it's a steal. I'd urge everyone from design pros to administrative assistants to buy this one.