Production for Graphic Designers review

Production for Graphic Designers has been the standard text on the subject since it first appeared in 1992 - a bible not only for its stated audience, but for anyone working in print.

So a new edition is quite an event, and it's exciting to see the cover, done by Frost Design as a Mac user interface screenshot, updated to Mac OS X. Unfortunately, not everything that follows is quite as fresh as this would suggest.

The basic format works fine. Pipes' text is clearly structured and copiously illustrated, and this edition's new design is clean and legible. Chapters on the various aspects of reproducing type and graphics are interspersed with profiles of well-chosen 'design trailblazers' such as Neville Brody, Chris Ware and Bruce Mau.

The book's real strength has always been in its detailed explanations of the nitty-gritty of prepress and print. Other books may give you a diagram of an offset litho press, but here you get three kinds, plus the woodpulp processing plant that makes the paper. Not only does Pipes explain how gravure, flexo and screenprinting work, he summarises their real-world pros and cons and throws in enough jargon to ensure printers don't blind you with science. It's good that this stuff has been kept in, even though some of it is decreasingly relevant to the average Mac-based designer.

On the other hand, the quality and depth of the material on traditional production shows up the limitations of what's been added on digital. All the right topics are covered, but often as if by an educated observer rather than a hands-on user, and you can see the joins between what's been revised and what hasn't. The rise of digital printing is fully acknowledged in the description of presses, for example, but not in the advice on choosing a print supplier, which talks about 'jobbing printers' who can handle only one or two colours per pass and have trouble with registration.

A chapter on the Internet and multimedia, dating from the second edition, has been renamed 'Digital Design'. Web design is still represented by a tutorial in raw HTML and that's not really acceptable in a book released in 2005, even if design for the screen isn't properly within its remit.

At the root of these disappointments is the inescapable fact that a new edition is, by its nature, not a new book. Perhaps the fifth edition should be. For now, Production for Graphic Designers remains one of those classic works of reference that's also easy to read from cover to cover, and if you work in print you should certainly consider buying it. In-depth digital production tips will have to be found elsewhere, though. Mark Gatter's Getting it Right in Print is worth a look, but again could be more convincingly up to date. We can only suggest you keep reading MacUser.