on 5 August 2005
Alan Pipes’ Production for Graphic Designers has been the standard text on the subject since it first appeared in 1992, a bible not only for its stated audience but for anyone and everyone working in print. So a new edition is quite an event, and it’s exciting to see the cover, done by Frost Design as a Mac user interface screenshot, updated to OS X. Unfortunately, not everything that follows is quite as fresh as this would suggest.
The basic format works fine. Pipes’ text is clearly structured and copiously illustrated, and this edition’s new design is clean and legible. Chapters on the various aspects of reproducing type and graphics are interspersed with profiles of well-chosen ‘design trailblazers’ such as Neville Brody, Chris Ware and Bruce Mau.
The book’s real strength has always lain in its detailed and authoritative explanations of the nitty-gritty of prepress and print; the wet work, so to speak. Other books may give you a diagram of an offset litho press, but here you get three kinds, plus the woodpulp processing plant that makes the paper. Not only does Pipes explain how gravure, flexo and screen printing work, he summarises their real-world pros and cons and throws in enough jargon to ensure printers don’t blind you with science.
It’s good that this stuff has been kept in, even though some of it is decreasingly relevant to the average Mac-based designer. Not all printers are all-digital, not all publications are filmless, and not everything you need to know about prepress can be found in the PDF/X specs. Not everyone who’s involved in graphic design uses a computer at all, and the book is aimed at those who don’t as well as those who do – however endangered their species.
On the other hand, the quality and depth of the material on traditional production shows up the limitations of what’s been added on digital. All the right topics are covered, but often as if by an educated observer rather than a hands-on user, and you can see the joins between what’s been revised and what hasn’t. The rise of digital printing is fully acknowledged in the description of presses, for example, but not in the advice on choosing a print supplier, which talks about ‘jobbing printers’ who can handle only one or two colours per pass and have trouble with registration. The first chapter’s erudite history of typesetting now mentions OpenType and even Adobe InCopy, but concludes by listing the pros and cons of hot metal, cold metal, photosetting and computer setting, as if the first three were still options.
A chapter on the Internet and multimedia, dating from the second edition, has been renamed ‘Digital Design’. Web design is still represented by a tutorial in raw HTML, mentioning CSS only in passing under the heading of ‘non-standard HTML’. That’s not really acceptable in a book released in 2005, even if design for the screen isn’t properly within its remit.
At the root of these disappointments is the inescapable fact that a new edition is, by its nature, not a new book. Perhaps the fifth edition should be. For now, Production for Graphic Designers remains one of those classic works of reference that’s also easy to read from cover to cover, and if you work in print you should certainly consider buying it. In-depth digital production tips, however, will have to be found elsewhere. Mark Gatter’s Getting it Right in Print, a smaller but promising guide to digital prepress, is also worth a look, but again could be more convincingly up to date. We can only suggest you keep reading MacUser.
Update (17 April 2009): A fifth edition is now available.
adambanksdotcom Google Instant seems like the search equivalent of the Interrupting Cow knock-knock joke