Rating: 
Summary: Data NOT Opinion
Review: An excellent book! Dr. Schriver uses data from user studies rather than personal opinion to support her recommendations and guidelines throughout the text. A very comprehensive and thorough approach to document design issues and user profiles.
Rating: 
Summary: A somewhat top-heavy, ponderous book
Review: As a designer of technical documentation for almost 12 years, I have studied, and used many of the concepts that Karen Schriver presents so well, in this definitive book on documentation design. For myself, finding this information and learning how to apply it to real-world situations was been a long and frustrating process, and there were many times when I wished for a book such as this.Dynamics in Document Design is not a how-to book, nor is it a set of guidelines. It is information compiled from extensive research that provides designers and writers with the many variables that can be used to make a document accessible to the reader. I am currently teaching document design as part of a technical writing certificate program at a local community college and Dynamics in Document Design is our recommended textbook. I am confident that Shriver's new book will become the reference bible for what many are referring to as the "emerging field" of document design (even though it has been emerging for more than a decade). In her Preface, Shriver states that she "...decided to write this book because it has been difficult to find resources devoted to helping document designers reflect on the nature of good writing and design from the perspective of the reader." Thank you Ms Schriver! This book should be read, not only by designers and writers, but just as importantly, by the companies whose products require documentation. I'm sure that many will be surprised by the correlations made between the quality of a product's documentation and the perceived quality of the product itself. I can't say enough good things about this book. Buy it and read it and use it to create good usable documentation!
Rating:
Summary: A very usable document about designing usable documents
Review: As a designer of technical documentation for almost 12 years, I have studied, and used many of the concepts that Karen Schriver presents so well, in this definitive book on documentation design. For myself, finding this information and learning how to apply it to real-world situations was been a long and frustrating process, and there were many times when I wished for a book such as this. Dynamics in Document Design is not a how-to book, nor is it a set of guidelines. It is information compiled from extensive research that provides designers and writers with the many variables that can be used to make a document accessible to the reader. I am currently teaching document design as part of a technical writing certificate program at a local community college and Dynamics in Document Design is our recommended textbook. I am confident that Shriver's new book will become the reference bible for what many are referring to as the "emerging field" of document design (even though it has been emerging for more than a decade). In her Preface, Shriver states that she "...decided to write this book because it has been difficult to find resources devoted to helping document designers reflect on the nature of good writing and design from the perspective of the reader." Thank you Ms Schriver! This book should be read, not only by designers and writers, but just as importantly, by the companies whose products require documentation. I'm sure that many will be surprised by the correlations made between the quality of a product's documentation and the perceived quality of the product itself. I can't say enough good things about this book. Buy it and read it and use it to create good usable documentation!
Rating:
Summary: A somewhat top-heavy, ponderous book
Review: As a graduate student in technical communication, I've been required to use this book as a course text. I can assure you few students referred to it regularly. As a professional tech writer, I still keep it on the shelf. For a book on document design, this does not appear to be the best example. If you want to scan for the salient points, this book is not for you. The 600 pages are very crowded and, though there is lots of good information in it, you have to do some digging. I wouldn't use this book as my only resource on the subject. If you add this one to your library, consider including books by Roger C. Parker and Robin Williams to complement to this volume.
Rating:
Summary: Schriver is Tufte for writers!
Review: Blew me away! Now, all we need is _Dynamics for Dummies_ because I can't get others to crack open the 600 page binding. This is the definitive book on document design, and covers the harder task of demonstrating that a document is successfully designed. One of the best highly technical books I've ever read. Covers history, modern practice, theory, links to other fields, etc. for lots of writing and communication issues. Slightly politically biased, which is one of the risks of a subjective writing style.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for information designers!
Review: Finally a book that takes information design seriously! I liked this book VERY much because it went beyond confirming what I know about writing and design to tell me things I never thought about. I liked being challenged instead of being coddled. What a refreshing book to show data of real people reading real documents. Eat your heart out Saul Wurman, Ed Tufte, Bob Horn and other pretenders who claim their design ideas captivate the reading public and then provide not a shred of evidence to support their speculations. Every serious designer and writer should read this book. Schriver has a rare talent for telling the story of the reader in the reader's words. A good read but also evidence-based design--a rare treat.
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful, but overly long and loosely held together
Review: For an author who believes in giving priority to readers, she actually does a rather poor job considering her reader. She is an academic and as such has the foible of wanting to put all her knowledge on display. So she's done little trimming and condensing of her material into a form that is really useful to readers who want to quickly get to core ideas about document design theory and practice.
The opening chapter abstracts are unnecessarily long, and just repeat what shortly follows in the body of the chapter. While I liked the way she put document design in a social and historical context, this could have been done much more succinctly. The long timeline is too tangentially related to what readers really want to know about, namely document design, to interest many of them. It seems included because the professor did a lot of research and just hated not to have more to show for it than a few succinct paragraphs.
Later chapters presenting the results of various reader response studies are interesting enough, but surely we could move more quickly to the results and their relevance to document design without spending so much time with dry narration of the actual empirical testing.
The theoretical section offers a long overview of theoretical approaches, arguing in favor of a rhetorical approach. Yet the chapters that go on to apply the theory offer advice and conclusions that hardly seem to warrant such a heavyweight theoretical foundation. For instance, the chapter on typography just offers familiar practical advice of the sort one gets in many introductory books on typography. The same is true about the long section about grids. All the opening theory favoring rhetorical approaches yields results that sound very close to the plain old common sense of the non-theoretical how-to craft school that gets debunked in the opening. So she does not end up making a very strong case for the value of her own theoretical approach, and we feel we waded through a lot of theory without much benefit.
In reality, I think she does have a case and she does have some good examples of how attending to the reader through empirical research can improve document design. But her ideas would be much more forcefully and usefully presented in 200 as opposed to 500 pages.
Rating:
Summary: What a wonderful book!
Review: For years I've purchased almost every book on writing and design I could get my hands on. This one ranks up there with the very best of what I've seen such as Edward Tufte. Actually, I like this one better because it is not vacuous about what cognitive art means. Tufte claims to tell us about how people respond to text but he never gives any data. How strange for a statistics prof! Schriver offers studies in which we see reader after reader responding to a real document. I very much liked hearing the voices of the audience and seeing what they said. BTW I noticed that one reviewer below chastizes Schriver's book, presumably for poor editing. However, in looking at the page he refers to, HE not Schriver introduces the typing error. Get a clue before you review! I found the writing very clear and personal. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to meet the needs of their audiences.
Rating:
Summary: Instant classic for professional writers, designers of docs
Review: Great definition of the emerging field of document design, good history of the influences coming from consumerism, academia, technical writing, graphic design. Fantasic timeline of document design, 1900-1995. Rich case studies of the way documents engage readers' thinking and feeling, leading to a new way to link usability testing with your next document design. Fascinating summaries of research on typography, space, and the interplay of words and pictures. Pluses: here's a researcher who has actually looked at real documents and real users. How refreshing! Also, she has written a usable book, one that follows her own recommendations-- another amazing feat! Practitioners and scholars alike will find this book easy to understand, wide in scope, and deep in implication. This thoughtful book makes Wurman's Information Architects look like a fancy poster, and Mok's Designing Business look like a casual first-person narrative. Don't miss it.
--Jonathan Pric
Rating: 
Summary: Tremendously valuable as a reference for document design.
Review: I read selected portions of Karen Schriver's book on document design. This is an excellent resource for those needing confirmation of design decisions or for those wanting guidance. I paid particular attention to the examples and the reviews of the impact of design and text choices. Some may be put off by parts of the book that are very academic; however, this is overshadowed by the practical information for "communications architects" (a phrase Ms. Schriver has coined to describe those of us who are both writers and designers of documents).
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