As the title implies, this is
not a
beginner's book on typography. Most of
the techniques discussed by Dowding,
although sound and well presented, may
not be beneficial to the reader without a
working knowledge of design and type.
Experienced designers, be forewarned;
Dowding is unavoidably influential in this
tome—the result of his lifetime of
experience in the typographic arts. At the
same time, he cannot escape that
experience. He is an unabashed
traditionalist, a master of the craft.
So if you think you might already be too
sensitive to type and layout, don't read
this book. I'm kidding, of course, but let
me explain: illustrating with examples,
Dowding discusses typographical layout
solutions which often suffer from lack of
attention to detail, then provides
corrected versions for comparison. This
method combined with a concise writing
style and his authoritative voice, will
undoubtedly heighten your typo-senses.
You will begin to see mistakes where you
read in blissful ignorance before. You will
know why a given passage is harder to
read than another (and no, it's not
necessarily the writer's fault). And you'll
begin to realize - there are lots of layouts
floating around out there that could use
more than a little tweaking.
I don't think that everything he proposes
is necessarily right. For example, in the
context of setting type for text - the
omission of spaces after full points when
followed by the capitals A, J, T, V, and Y.
Although this is still logically consistent
with his other principles, a possible
sacrifice of legibility for color defeats
what he wanted to achieve.
Still, I enjoyed reading this book and can
safely say I will never look at another
paragraph, sentence, or word, quite the
same again. Having never seen the
previous editions of this book, I cannot
compare them, but this revised edition
suits me just fine. The pages were
faithfully composed employing Dowding's
own principles, which makes 'Finer Points'
a pleasure to behold.
