The Non-Designer's Design Book

About the book

Robin Williams wrote this book for readers who produce newsletters, flyers, reports, slides or web pages and suspect their pages look amateurish without knowing why. It addresses print layout and desktop publishing, with typography treated as a central craft rather than decoration. It works as a handbook, organized for reference as much as for sequential reading.

The approach rests on a small set of design principles that Williams names and then demonstrates through paired examples, showing a weak layout beside a revised one. Contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity serve as working tools rather than abstract theory. Readers learn to diagnose a page by looking at how elements sit in relation to each other.

Because the book grew out of a desktop publishing context, its examples lean toward documents made on a computer: headings, body text, captions and white space. The typography sections cover type categories and the practical consequences of choosing among them. The emphasis stays on decisions a non-specialist can make and defend.

How to read it

Read the principles as a checklist rather than a set of rules to memorize. The before-and-after examples carry most of the instruction, so spend time comparing each pair and naming what changed. The prose is plain and the chapters are short, which makes the book easy to sample when a specific layout problem arises.

The typography material rewards slower attention, since type choices interact with the layout principles. Keep a current project nearby and test one principle at a time. Some examples reflect the software and print conventions of the 1990s, so translate the underlying idea rather than copying the exact treatment.

Who it suits

This suits people who write and assemble documents but have no formal design education: office staff producing reports, small organizations making their own publicity, students formatting papers, and anyone moving from word processing into page layout. It also helps writers who want to understand why a page reads easily or awkwardly.

Reading considerations

The book is introductory and print-oriented. It will not cover interface design, accessibility standards or contemporary web layout in depth, and its software references date from the desktop publishing era. Readers seeking advanced typographic history or professional production detail should look elsewhere.