Every day we encounter examples of good design. They cross our desk, arrive in our mailbox, appear on our TV screen. We recognize them because they grab our attention. Whether they're ads, fliers, book covers, magazine articles, or financial reports, there's something about them that makes us want to look.
Now we have the tools to do something of the kind ourselves: The Macintosh system offers us innumberable choices - thousands of colors to choose from, pictures to scan, type styles to use, and software for laying out pages and manipulating art and text.
At first this may seem only to make our task more daunting. Which of those choices lead to a professional-looking result? Which lead to the kind of drab, forgettable effort that stinks to the bottom of the in-box?
As the illustrated examples in this book show, we can do wonderful things with color. It will take hold of our viewers in a way nothing else can, attracting and directing attention, evoking feelings, making information clearer and easier to grasp. Later on, the book tells us more about how these examples wer done. A noticeable aspect of the illustrated examples is that each one of the documents shown gets its point across loud and clear.
The information in this book has to be used as guidelines, not laws. Design is an art, not a science, and we need to leave room for imagination, intuition, and impulse. Only one principle applies in all cases. Whether we're designing in color or in 'black & white', the purpose of our design choices is to communicate, in the most powerful way possible, the message of our document.