The advent of desktop publishing has given anyone with a computer and a laser printer the ability to produce professional-quality documents. Unfortunately, it has also given these same people the ability to produce amazingly ugly and amateurish documents, since there is a lot more to document design than initially meets the eye.

Parker’s book tries to teach enough about design to let its readers create competent-looking documents. Most of the advice is oriented toward newsletters and flyers, the most common kinds of documents done on the desktop.

The book is in three parts. The first part covers the elements of design at a basic level. The author describes page elements such as headers, footers, gutters, and alignment; says a little bit about fonts (for example, “Use bold italic to make a point really stand out”); introduces design elements such as boxes, drops, and reversed boxes; and finishes with a short list of design flaws such as misplaced white space and excessive crowding. This section is modestly informative, although I would think that nearly all of it would be familiar to anyone who had done any document production at all. The design rules read like a laundry list of suggestions; some more structure in thinking about documents would have been helpful.

The second and most useful part of the book has before-and-after illustrations of sample documents. For the most part, the “after” versions are indeed considerably improved, although the redesigns are often gimmicky, and whenever the redesign contains a chart or a graph, the new chart verges on chartjunk, extraneous visual elements that obscure the data in the chart.

The third part has short chapters discussing many different kinds of publications: newsletters, newspapers, advertisements, sales materials, books, manuals, slides and notes, letterheads, business cards, fax cover sheets, forms, coupons, and surveys. Most are covered in too little detail to be very useful, although Parker points out the design issues for each. An extensive annotated bibliography offers the opportunity to find out more about topics of interest.

Overall, for someone who knows nothing at all about document design, this book could be a useful introduction. For someone with any publication experience, however, it contains too little new material to be much help.