Grafik Magazine
Issue 166, Editorial Design — Showcase
September 2008
If formats get you feeling a bit frisky, fresh graph paper gets you misty-eyed and a diagram of
international paper standards is, for you, nothing short of frame-worthy artwork, then this
book should work like vectorised Valium on your graphic erogenous zone. Subtitled 'A Workbook
for Graphic Design', Mark Boyce's creation (published by Laurence King) is part sketchbook,
part reference manual and, yes, part graphic porn.
But once you get past the first flush of excitement upon opening Sizes May Vary, it becomes
clear that this is also a very practical tool for the everyday realities of design work. There are pages
upon pages of templates for all of the formats you are ever likely to work with, including all
imaginable sizes and shapes of envelopes, CD and DVD packaging, web browser windows,
stationery sets, outdoor advertising hoardings and poster and billboard configurations from
four-sheet posters to ninety-six sheet billboards. And if that's not enough, you get the lot as editable
vector files on an accompanying disc. Gold dust. There's also a pull-out poster of international
standard paper sizes and a section of practical information and measurements on all the formats
featured as well as sections of deliciously empty plain, lined and graph paper and book signatures.
All of it is waiting — naked and expectant — for you to fill up with your designs. Grafik for one
is itching to get sketching.
300 Million
Newsblog — Opinions May Vary
October 2008
Well done to friend of 300m, Mark Boyce, who has released his informative, bold and dead
useful new book 'Sizes May Vary' (Laurence King publishing). The tome could be described as
a homage to the Lord of Vector-Based Line Work. Actually, you could well imagine 'Vector'
as the anti-hero in some 80s Filmation cartoon. That, or, the in-joke named little, placid studio
mut of some West Coast Cali design guru. 'Fetch color swatch fan, Vector. Fetch!
Anyway, the book is a must-have for orderly graphic designers who like their measurements
down to five decimal places and who spend their working days working nose-to-screen at
the 'enough already' level of magnification where Adobe Illustrator no longer puts the plus sign
inside the magnifying glass symbol. It's also the sort of book that will just bamboozle mums
and dads and confirm that they'll never quite grasp what their children do for a living. We marvel
at the audacity of a bold, wordless DPS of a load of 0.25pt rectangles — meanwhile, everyone
else shuffles down befuddled to the Maeve Binchy section.
Grafik Magazine
Issue 169, 2008 In Review — Top Fifty
December 2008
Life got a little bit easier for countless graphic designers in 2008 with the publication of Mark
Boyce's book Sizes May Vary, a graphic toolbox of standard formats all beautifully reproduced
and supplied as handy, editable vector files on an accompanying disc. We also know of
one designer who merrily offered to commit some very dubious acts in exchange for our copy
of the poster that comes with Sizes May Vary (we declined). It features an A1 diagram of
international standard paper sizes and is frankly frameable.
The Functionality
January 2009
Sizes May Vary is a content book for graphic designers. It has an incredible amount of page to
container relationships. Where once there were a series of sheets, templates or forms that paired
sheet-size to envelope-size, Mark Boyce has created a compelling illustration of those systems.
At The Functionality we think that a book like this is not only beautiful its effect could be bountiful.
The Designers Review of Books
Books for the creative mind — 2d, 3d
February 2009
If you are the kind of person who walks into stationery shop and pauses to inhale the smell of
fresh paper or spends hours trying to find the ultimate sketching pens, then you will enjoy
opening up Mark Boyce's book, Sizes May Vary: A Workbook for Graphic Design, published by
Laurence King.
Similar, in some respects, to The Little Know It All, it is a book of sizes and forms for almost
everything a designer might need to design for across a range of disciplines. It is a curiosity too,
in the sense that there is not a lot to read in it and that it is a book you are intended to draw in.
This means you will enter into the emotional conflict of wanting to scribble in it and at the
same time preserve its ready-to-be-scribbled-upon creamy whiteness.
Boyce explains that the book is... "Part sketchbook, part reference book and part notebook
— it is a space for composing and visualizing layouts, sketching and developing ideas, taking
reference and making note."
To get more informal, you can unwrap the bright yellow dust-jacket and use the naked,
cardboard bound book as a sketchbook. Carry it around with you, draw up roughs, storyboards,
wireframes, make notes, design typefaces and always have the most useful information to
hand in the back of it. You can pretend to be the smartest person at the table.
But wait! There's more!, as they say in cheap TV ads in Australia. Due to a kind of graphic
design wormhole, the book also contains a CD with EPS files of everything that is in the book.
You can use these for project wireframes, roughs and presentations across a range of design
disciplines and integrate them into your own files and templates. Boyce has saved the lazy rest of
us an enormous amount of time by producing this set of templates.
The good news is that you don't really have to struggle with drawing in your copy — you can
always print out the parts you want (graph paper that matches international paper size ratios, for
example), bind your own sketchbooks and even get yourself a custom engraved cover.
Sizes May Vary has been produced in three versions — one for the UK, one for the USA
and one in Spanish. Each of them has slight variations to cover local standards, but the CD
has all three sets of EPS files, whichever copy you buy.