Reviews
Karen A. Schriver
Dynamics in document design:
creating texts for readers
New York: John Wiley, 1997
ISBN 0 - 4 7 1 - 3 0 6 3 6 - 3 , paperback (560pp)
$39.95/£32.50
A book I can recommend
For years I have been at a loss as to how to
respond to the question 'what books do you
recommend?'. My response is usually a list of
books and articles, heavily qualified in various
ways - get Edward Tufte's books, absorb his
collection of information design classics, marvel
at the production values (and then read Nigel
Holmes as an antidote). Read Jan White for his
accessible style and rare designer's articulation
of the interplay between the visual and the ver-
bal. Read articles by Pat Wright, Michael
Twyman and others - mostly published in jour-
nals and proceedings not easily reached away
from a university library. Read back issues of
Information design journal.
Karen Schriver has solved my problem,
and provided the key ingredients for a book
I can recommend:
• a sense of information design's heritage -
where it came from, what it is, and what it is
not (although she prefers the term 'document
design', of which more later)
• a sizeable bibliography (albeit with some
inevitable omissions of personal favourites)
• a focus on the readers' experience as the
central issue (it is sub-titled 'creating text for
readers')
• a search for working methods, not just
miraculously conceived solutions
• case studies, together with documentation of
the designers' strategies and evidence of read-
ers' reactions
• an intelligent balance between research find-
ings, evolved genres, and creative solutions.
So it was with some trepidation that I started
to review it, fearful that my first impression
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Information Design Journal 9:1 (1998), 80–83. DOI 10.1075/idj.9.1.20wal
ISSN 0142–5471 / E-ISSN 1569–979X © John Benjamins Publishing Company
might not be justified. In any case, how could
I possibly criticise a book that describes
Information design journal as 'influential'.
What kind of book is it?
Published in the Wiley Computer Publishing
series, and with computer imagery on the cover,
the book looks and feels like one of those fat
squarish computer books that you expect to be
written as an introduction to some clearly-
defined technical concepts. But this isn't
document design for dummies.
In fact, I had some trouble identifying its
genre, and thus the critical rules by which I
should evaluate it. It is as much a curriculum as
a book. With frequent footnotes and citations, it
is mostly written in an academic tradition that
presents practical recommendations within a
theoretical and scientific context. There are also
brisk historical surveys that belong in an intro-
ductory textbook, and other features that would
be more at home in a practical manual (and
which seem oddly out of place here, until you
remember it is published in a computer books
list) - for example, an appendix listing the Zapf
Dingbats symbols, and how to access them
from your PC keyboard.
If it is a textbook, some readers - not me -
may find the frequent citations rather over-
done. Citations have perhaps three distinct
functions: at their best they credit the source
of an idea with prior publication; they also help
readers who want to follow up with further
reading; and lastly they are sometimes used to
lend an authority of sorts to the author who
feels the reader will have less trust in an un-
supported idea. (In another book I once found
myself cited in support of some guideline, but
on checking the cited paper, an obscure and
unobtainable conference presentation, found
I had made a simple assertion. The reader of
the citation, though, could have assumed I
was reporting on a major scientific study.)
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Over the years I've often been surprised to
hear designers refer to IDJ as very highbrow,
theoretical and ivory-tower - and so it is a worry
that information designers who see themselves
as practical problem-solving types may actually
find this book's length, depth and frequent cita-
tions a barrier. Having said that, Schriver
argues convincingly that this is precisely what is
needed to augment the numerous introductory
texts that are available: 'My goal is to offer a
research-based view of document design that
reflects the complexity and difficulty that sea-
soned writers and graphic designers have expe-
rienced' (p. xxiv).
Summarising the book
The contents list should help me summarise
the book for you, but it is not to my mind a
great success. Spread over seven pages, with
many headings in all upper-case, and an
unsay able structure that involves three parts,
and seven something-elses (chapters, I suppose,
not sections, as some of them are themselves
divided into section i, section 2 and so on),
I find myself having to concentrate quite hard
to relay the structure of the book. My difficulty
probably reflects its mix of genres, and probably
also the struggle it must have been to articulate
so much reading, insight and experience and to
reconcile a range of conflicting views. Some
parts seem to be something of a brain dump,
but there is so much of interest in Karen
Schriver's brain that I'm happy to accept it.
Part 1 'Situating document design'
Schriver sees her audience not as beginners but
as recent converts to the information design
approach who want to place their field in a
social, historical and cultural context, who want
to engage with the critical issues, who want to
gain the sort of insight that comes from seeing
an experienced practitioner in action. They
won't be disappointed - they'll find strong
views to take issue with, as I did from time to
Information design journal 9 / 1 (1998)
81
time, research findings, and expert consensus
opinion to use as guidance. In short, a sense of
being part of a profession with its own distinc-
tive debates, values and methods. And ethics,
with an echo of Otto Neurath's definition of the
transformer as 'trustee of the public': 'docu-
ment designers must stand up for the reader,
making sure they know what happens to the
documents they work on' (page 206).
Part 1 seeks to reinforce this sense of belong-
ing to a profession by tracing its historical roots,
and relating it to events and trends in society as
a whole. Although some will miss their heroes,
Schriver is generous in her description of UK
work in establishing the field, and acknowledges
important contributions from other English-
speaking countries. Starting with history (and it
includes one of those time lines which blends
minor incidents such as 'Second World War
starts' and major events like 'Information
Design Journal launched') is perhaps risky, as
it gives us all something to quarrel with before
we get to the main point of the book.
Part 2 'Observing readers in action'
The preface establishes that at the heart of
book is Schriver's appreciation of the context in
which documents are both produced and used -
and it is this that above all else lifts this book to
a higher level than many of the dreary research
papers she accords so much respect to. She
hopes 'to capture the texture of the choices doc-
ument designers make and represent the subtle-
ty of the knowledge they rely on in carrying out
their work'. But lest designers become smug at
this welcome recognition of the validly of their
craft knowledge, she also has a challenge for
those who have little idea or interest in what
people actually do with documents: 'I want to
enable document designers to imagine the read-
ers' world more vividly - to envision people rif-
fling through pages, clicking on hypertext links,
ferreting out fact from hype, mapping prose to
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pictures, wondering what the heck something
means' (p. xxv).
This, above all, is what the book is about.
It tells us how to design by telling us how people
read. How people read is described in terms of
research, in terms of models and in the evidence
of real readers using documents. And impor-
tantly, in her own work if not in all the studies
she cites, readers are modelled, described and
recorded using real documents for real purposes
and in the context of real beliefs, not just labo-
ratory text for a scientist's purpose (with their
beliefs, preconceptions and questions checked
in at the lab door). In this the largest part of the
book, there are extensive worked examples that
provide an invaluable resource for those want-
ing insight into how layouts work, how pictures
and text work together, how gestalt principles
operate, and what researchers have contributed.
Part 3 Responding to readers' needs'
Schriver argues throughout for what she terms
a feedback-driven model of design, as distinct
from an intuition-driven model. T h e final part
of the book is designed to back up the feedback-
driven method with some real techniques
demonstrated through case studies. I find the
distinction less clearcut than she intends - as
I understand her argument, the intuition-driven
model is where the designer imagines a reader
and provides for their imagined need, whereas
the feedback-driven method is informed by
actual readers. Now she does naturally
acknowledge that you can't always get feed-
back, but that you may have to rely on getting
enough to inform your judgement generally -
in other words your intuition.
Dynamics in document design is a campaigning
book - it doesn't overtly push a highly theoreti-
cal viewpoint, but presents all the evidence that
can be mustered for some basic truths: that lan-
guage and design are intricately connected; that
readers have identifiable needs that should be
Information design journal 9 / 1 (1998)
82
taken seriously; that direct exposure to the evi-
dence of readers' needs is the key to document
design; that practitioners and researchers each
have important things to contribute. It reads
pretty much like a mission statement for
Information design journal, in fact.
It's an effective mixture of historical survey,
research review, research report and manifesto.
Glued together with Karen Schriver's astute
observation of the complex processes of making
and using documents, this is going to be an
important sourcebook for the next generation
of converts to information, sorry... document
design.
Postscript: Document design vs information design
Which brings me to the matter of the name we
give our field. Much as I want to agree with
everything Karen Schriver says, I was barely six
pages in when I found myself baulking at her
discussion of the competing terms 'document
design' and 'information design'.
In a book packed with meticulous citation,
it is odd to find none in a debate described in
some detail between 'some writers and design-
er' and 'opponents to using the term "informa-
tion design'". She links the term 'information
design' directly to the Shannon-Weaver infor-
mation theory model, and deploys the argu-
ments against that, against the term 'informa-
tion design'. For Schriver, 'information' appar-
ently carries with it metaphorical baggage that
I personally don't find there - the container
metaphor implicit in information theory that
suggest facts neatly packaged and transported
to a passive reader. 'Document', though, is in
contrast seen as suggesting 'the act of writing
and designing', an inference that completely
escapes me.
It never before occurred to me that the term
'document design' represented a profound
rejection of a model of communication repre-
sented by the term 'information design'. Surely
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document design simply reflects a slightly dif- wrong with the editing of the marginal note on p. 35 that
ferent tradition to information design, but one says 'the blue pencil, appearing around 1888, used a spe-
cial blue lead that made editing marks invisible on photo-
with many shared objectives. Document design, copies'.
exemplified by the Document Design Center in
the USA and the DHSS Document Design Unit
Robert Waller
in the UK, came out of the plain English move- Information Design Unit
ment, with language specialists taking the active Old Chantry Court
role and recruiting designers to their cause. Newport Pagnell
Buckinghamshire
Information design, though, was the other way
MK16 8AB
around. It came out of graphic design - and
graphic designers are perhaps less focused on
documents than on wider systems of communi-
cations and graphic identity.
If I reject the term 'document design' it is
because it seems to me too focused on the docu-
ment as an object rather than on broader pro-
cesses. It is inadequate to describe the work our
consultancy does in, for example, designing dia-
logue systems where phone conversations are
interchangeable with information-giving and
information-gathering forms or screens. And
'document design' doesn't work in the area of
wayfinding - signage systems are not docu-
ments but they are information, and a number
of concepts derived from research on wayfind-
ing provide useful metaphors for dealing with
the design of complex documents or interfaces.
But perhaps this is just a case of 'you say tom-
ahto and I say tomayto ... ' and we should call the
calling off off. After all, neither term has got
through to the publisher, Wiley*, who resolute-
ly insist on the subject classification 'writing/
graphic design' on the back cover.

*And in a final criticism of the publisher (I assume), the

book could have done with some tougher editing. Some
descriptions are unnecessarily long - we are treated, for
example, to an eight-page mind-crunching account of the
author's problems programming her video recorder. It
does make an important point about the concept of 'prob-
lem space', but this is lost in the detail. And I do have to
mention some howlers that have crept in, I feel sure, dur-
ing the copy-editing process. For example, 'ragged-right
text (also called ranged-right text)' and 'ragged-left text
(also called ranged-left text)'. And something clearly went

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