Transcaucasia, Nationalism, and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan,... Book

I used to teach a course based on this book. The book, while the information contained within is good... is a great example of how to NOT design a book. The layout of the book makes this difficult to read and understand. The entire book is typeset in a swiss sans serif for the body copy. This made it extremely difficult for not only my students to read and comprehend, but also for myself. EVERY halfway decent Graphic Designer knows that body copy is always to be set (for any lengthy publication of mostly text) in a SERIF typeface to ease the reader into a flow and continue to advance when reading. My students and myself found ourselves constantly tripping over the fact we were re-reading paragraph lines of text we had already read. The typesetting and layout made advancing through the copy very difficult. Too bad the layout was terrible while the content was of good quality.

Because this book is the only complete book on this subject I was forced to continue to use it. I used this bad layout/typesetting as a prime example of what NOT to do in design. It demonstrated to my students how a good message can be lost in bad design. (And vice versa) This topic generated many a good classroom discussions on the subject.