Pentagram's Abbott Miller Reading Summary

The reading shows how Abbott Miller, an american graphic designer and writer, thinks and feels about design. It seems in the beginning of the reading Miller is somewhat against logos, even though his book Design and Content includes plenty. Logos to him seems to take away from the narrative that design can provide. He talks about how graphic design has changed immensely through the years but has also leaned more towards on the term "branding" and has become so important in graphic design. It has become, in Miller's eyes, repetitive in a way that it can sometimes take over what the actual design and personality is about. The word "brand" has taken over individual aspects of design, which I would definitely agree with.

The interview in the reading also showed how collaborative Miller is when working on ideas. He would rather be social about design and talk it over then work by himself and being single minded. I feel some graphic designers should try doing this a little more and have Miller's same mindset. In another interview question, Miller was asked which he liked better, exhibitions, book design, or app design. He said he loves exhibitions but not the fact that they only last about a month. He is more into book design for the reason that books aren't just something that is there for a month at a time, but can be around for decades.

Reading: Thinking With Type // Letter, Grid, and Text.

1) The advantages of multiple column grid is that it provides more flexibility when formatting for publications that have a complex hierarchy or that have integrated text and illustrations. The more columns you create, the more flexible the grid.

2) Characters that would be optimal for a line length would mostly depend on how wide the columns were made.


3) A baseline grid is used in design to serve as an anchor to nearly all layout elements to a common rhythm.

4) There are a few reasons to have justified and ragged text in typography. With justified text, it keeps edges even on both the left and right sides of the columns. It makes an efficient use of space and a clean, compact shape on the page. With ragged text, it respects the flow of the language instead of following the law of the typical box. Ragged text can be considered good and bad- it is good when the edges are consistently ragged, and bad when some edges are straight and some are not.

5) A typographic river is gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.

6) A hang line is a horizontal reference point dividing a page. A hang line is used for example, when a body of text can hang from a common line and an area across can be reserved for images, etc.

7) Type Color is the weight of the text.

8) Typeface with a taller x-height have a heavier color and with shorter x-height, a lighter color.

9) Some ways to indicate a new paragraph is by indenting and outdenting with line breaks, extra space inside a line without line breaks, and symbols. Avoid indenting the very first line of a body text.