Applied Design for Printers

Gage, Harry Lawrence, 1887-1982Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.5

Word count: 77K words
Chapters: 8

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Applied Design for Printers by Harry Lawrence GageAuthor: Gage, Harry Lawrence, 1887-1982,Language: English, Class: Z: Bibliography, Library science, Release Date: Dec 30, 2009

Editor's review

Written for printing professionals, this book examines design practice in the context of actual print production, covering layout, type, proportion, white space, and visual order. Its value lies in not treating aesthetics as an abstraction but in emphasizing how design serves readability, production conditions, and commercial communication. For today's readers, the specific techniques may feel unfamiliar as technology has changed, yet the thinking on information hierarchy, page rhythm, and overall control of printed matter remains instructive. It suits as supplementary reading in design history and printing craft, and for editors, typesetters, and graphic designers to reflect on their daily work. Read it alongside modern design software and printing workflows, distinguishing which principles hold across technical conditions and which are operational experience of a particular era.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Graphic design and typesetting professionals seeking to understand the basic principles of print design
Students of editing and publishing who need grounding in layout and printing craft
Readers interested in the history of printing and design
Editors and content producers seeking to improve their control of layout

Not a good fit for

Readers looking for tutorials on the latest digital typesetting software
Those who do no visual design at all and want pure theoretical aesthetics
Practitioners expecting a manual of contemporary printing technical parameters

Reading tips

Compare the book's examples and principles by analyzing the layout of an existing printed piece as an exercise.
When reading descriptions of specific techniques, note their historical context and distinguish principles from outdated operations.
Read alongside a modern textbook on layout design to set history against the present.
You may read closely only the chapters on type, proportion, and white space rather than spreading effort evenly.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book about modern design software?

No. The book was written earlier and discusses the basic principles of print design and the production conditions of its time; it does not cover contemporary design software. Readers should treat it as material on design principles and printing history, not as a software tutorial.

Will non-design readers gain from it?

Selectively. Its discussion of information hierarchy, page order, and readability offers insights for editing, writing, and content presentation, but the many printing details may be tedious for non-practitioners; reading selected chapters on principles is advisable.

Do the design principles in the book still apply today?

Partly. Principles such as proportion, white space, type pairing, and visual hierarchy retain value across technical conditions, but specific techniques, materials, and production workflows have changed greatly; readers should judge them in light of modern printing and on-screen reading environments.

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About the author

Gage, Harry Lawrence, 1887-1982 Author · 1887–1982

Harry Lawrence Gage (1887–1982) is an author whose life and nationality are only sparsely documented in publicly available sources. What can be confirmed is that he wrote Applied Design for Printers. Judging from its title and subject, the book addresses design as it applies to printing practice rather than abstract aesthetic theory; Gage was evidently concerned with the practical needs of prepress work and page layout, and his writing carries the tone of a trade guide. Because historical records are scarce, his education, institutional affiliations, and specific career remain difficult to verify, and the later influence of his work is not well documented. Overall, Gage is an author known for a single practical technical work, regarded by readers mainly as an early practitioner-writer in printing design; a fuller picture of his life still awaits further documentation.