Free Chinese language excerpts released by the author here.
A point which really caught my eye was the author’s reaction to the Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. In fact, this is how the author caught the eye of his interviewer for his first employer, Tencent,
我说这些作品都是我先在白纸上手绘——主要是彩色铅笔——然后用照相机拍下来，放到ps里处理一下对比度什么的，就作为一个设计了，然后还有自己喜欢的专辑里的一些元素，然后还考虑了色彩，还有一些信息的对齐之类的， 其实我的设计知识仅限于看的一本书《写给大家看的设计书》。这本书非常棒，到现在为止我都反复看了3遍以上，因为约书亚树原理说的是，当你对一个概念的名字很熟悉的时候，当你看到这个概念，就会马上意识到，而不是无意识的一晃而过。然后我就提到了书里说的设计的四大原则：对齐、对比、距离和重复，面试官表示很有兴趣。
(Rough translation: I first hand-drawed these works on white paper - mainly colored pencils - and then photographed them with a camera, put them in Photoshop to process the contrast and so on, and then used them as a design, and then included my favorite albums…
In fact, my design knowledge is limited to a book I read, “the Non-Designer’s Design Book” This book is very good. I have read it more than three times so far, because the Joshua Tree Principle says that when you are familiar with the name of a concept, when you see the concept, you will immediately Be aware of it, rather than just passing by unconsciously. Then I mentioned the four principles of design mentioned in the book: alignment, contrast, distance and repetition, and the interviewer expressed great interest.)
After reading this, I also got “the Non-Designer’s Design Book” from the libraries. Even just skimming it is eye-opening: the author provides a lot of “before” and “after” examples to illustrate how very simple matters such as line-spacing and alignment can make a huge difference in the feel of a printed document.
PS The prose in this book is extremely readable. In fact the title is a humourous play on a Russian text on acting, An Actor Prepares, which has a pretentious name in Chinese (mis?)-translation made fun of in the Hong Kong comic classic King of Comedy.