Posts filed under 'book design'
September 2nd, 2010
Okay, I’ve about had it with book design. Or a particular kind of book design. I don’t even know whether to call it bad design or what, but this book I’ve been trying to get into has finally driven me away with a headache and a very tired feeling in my eyes.
At the same time, it is a terrific-looking book with plenty of interesting elements. But taken all together, it gets in the way of reading the book. And I love to read.
Isn’t a book’s design really not supposed to get in the way of the reading? (I mean, I know I write and say all the time that a book’s design should not separate a reader from a book. I’ve always known this—just instinctively at first, and then I knew it—as I learned about making pages and setting type. But really.
I stare right now at the last page I was able to make my way through before it became impossible. My eyes actually began to feel sore as I struggled to focus on the page. And, strangely, it’s not as if the page or the whole book is a total eyesore, exactly. There’s an attractive precision to it. In the upper left corner of this page, a verso, positioned to run vertically is a subhead in, maybe, 36- or 42-point type, some sans serif. (I am not very good at coming up with the names of type on sight, no matter how much I set.)
Under the vertically-oriented subhead is a narrow display column of, perhaps, 7- or 8-point sans serif. Widely-leaded for legibility, it is still a bit small for reading more than just a couple of lines; and there are 31 such narrow lines there.
The main text area is more than 30 picas wide. The text there is set double line-spaced, in about 10- or 11-point boldface sans serif. There’s just way too much sans serif type to be read.
Then there’s a tiny 5- or 6-point sans serif in light blue, lightface sans serif. Tough to read. And if that’s not enough there’s a footnote in tinier sans serif still. I can’t really make it out without my reading glasses, which I don’t ordinarily need unless my eyes are exhausted.
Now, the only defense I can make for this designer—who is big-time famous and doesn’t need defending by little, ol’ me—is that he is also the book’s author. But still.
August 28th, 2010
Late one night during this past week I was reminded of the torturous times I spent reading of Jan Tschichold, his work, and his own writings, when I found Alex Charchar’s piece, “The Secret Canon & Page Harmony” on the blog Retinart. I say “torturous” because I have all kinds of mixed feelings about him, his work, and his words.
First, my feeling is that, while his “take” on page design should be required reading, I would never call it “the rules,” because it was just such rigidity in which he expressed himself at times that I reject. But I still think there is benefit to learning the way Tschichold thought books should be designed.
I read a translation of “Die neue Typographie” some time ago. I would love to have read—and to own—a copy of The Form of the Book. Only thing is, the one time I had the spare cash to lay out for a copy—it’s apparently rare and, therefore, priced dearly—I opted to spend $400 on a 30-year old bottle of scotch. No regrets there, but I still would give my eyeteeth for a copy of of The Form of the Book.
Tschichold, I think, is hard to appreciate truly without placing him in context. I do not totally reject his theory that the best text page is unadorned and plain, so that nothing comes between the reader and the author’s words. Consider that he came from a time and place when books were typeset in that heavy, unreadable German blackletter type. Just a horribly distracting—and now all but illegible—way to see printed words. But his leap to the plainest sans serif available to him at the time, Akzidenz Grotesk, although both an improvement and the most practical choice available to him led him down a path that, some years later, Tschichold himself plled back from publicly.
As for his perfect text area proportion, there are many harmonious ratios to set type by. Both Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Designing books: practice and theory by Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross do good jobs of discussing a whole range of such ratios. Bringhurst pays particular attention to those based on organic, mechanical, and musical proportions. Tschichold likely would have none of this, as much as for any reason, I suspect, as that he didn’t think of them. I mean, this was a man who, when he lectured, did not permit questions.
So I do appreciate him, I just don’t cotton to him. And next Christmas I would like another bottle of 30-year old scotch and a copy of The Form of the Book.
August 17th, 2010
Last time out I may have sounded a little like the stern lecturer or a schoolmarm, admonishing self-publishing authors with my short list of “shoulds” for their success. But I return this time to make clear that working on self-publishing authors’ books beats working for traditional publishers in many ways.
That is not to say I never want to work for a traditional publisher, though by all accounts the traditional publishing model is in big trouble. I simply recognize the advantages of the streamlined self-publishing process.
Let me give you a for-instance.
A question about something I notice in a textfile I bring into the book document as I make pages can take days to get answered from a traditional publisher, as it makes its way from my contact person—usually a production editor or head of the design department—to the editor on the project and maybe even the author. Additionally, if some irregularity in the writing, something inconsistent with what the author did earlier, surfaces, it would not be out of the question for the structure of a traditional publisher to discourage my pointing it ut.
Working with a self-publisher, I always find myself and the author-client rowing in the same direction: doing whatever we can to make the best possible books, even if it means my commenting about a sudden change in the narrative voice, say. The best thing, overall, however, is the expeditious process for asking questions and receiving answers. As little a thing as this may sound like, quick, clear communication again makes any project a better experience and a good book more likely.
July 24th, 2010
I’ve read a lot on blogs and Twitter recently about the question of whether self-publishing is just another name for “vanity publishing.” A little deeper is a discussion on Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer blog, “Top 10 Worst Self-Publishing Mistakes—Explained!” A lively conversation, it takes in the “Does self- equal vanity- question.” But, with an avalanche of comments, it also gets much farther. Issues such as marketing, getting reviews, and one of my favorite subjects—the use of typefaces—are raised.
Early on I offered my prescription for success as a self-publishing author:
1. Write well about something people want to read about
I suppose I missed a chance to agree with those who put marketing research as their starting point. Admittedly, I have a bias against blind marketing and what I like to call “the selling of selling.” But the truth is, one can choose to write about a subject that has a large natural audience or is particularly of the moment. I’m momentarily finishing up work on just such a subject, about the Alaskan oil pipeline.
2. Engage an editor and, perhaps, a copy editor to make sure you’ve gotten it down and gotten it right
I know many authors are loathe to entrust their babies to another caretaker, but often after spending so much “close time” with a piece of one’s own writing, perspective is lost and the author could really benefit from another pair of eyes and a professional’s “take” on the subject and presentation.
3. Contract professional, freelance book design and page comp to give your book the best chance to attract potential readers
As a freelance book designer, I, of course, remain very big on this step. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: amateur-looking design hurts the sale of a self-published book, which already has a formidable hurdle to get over, if it is to find an audience and sell more than the typical 100 or so copies most self-published books manage to sell.
The first thing potential readers see is the cover. The cover needs to invite prospects to pick up the book, at which point they should become interested in what that cover suggests is inside. Then, when they open the book, the interior design needs to connect with the cover, sort of fulfilling the promise of the look the cover puts forth. The writing, the substance of the book, should then take over, grabbing interest of readers who are led through the lines and pages of the book by the work of the interior designer.
That’s my half of the equation. Then, too, at least from the point where the book’s writing is complete, perhaps sooner, the self-publishing author should formulate a plan for reaching the people most likely to be readers of his or her book.
Following these steps and my little coda on marketing is at least a feasible plan to getting above and beyond the 100-copies sales plateau.
May 25th, 2010
Continuing in what has become the busiest year of my life so far, and certainly the most successful in my career as a freelance book designer/layout artist, I am about to begin another “straight layout” job. That is, where I am provided a template and make some other designer’s pages.
This is, you might say, a return to my roots. I worked at least a couple of years doing such book layout work in the early ’90s before I hired on for my first interior design and layout job. I have always felt that starting out in publishing as a proofreader forced me to see, in an unerringly stripped down fashion, how words on a printed page are supposed to look. This, in turn, fostered a nitpicky concern for typography generally and an intolerance for crappy (to use the term of art) wordspacing specifically.
Doing page layout in those beginning years I simply gravitated to a line-by-line scan/search technique with my eyes—that is, looking line-by-line—to find every spot on every page in every book I worked where I might “drive a truck” through the wordspacing because it seemed so wide to me.
I took that feel for typography with me into book design projects. I always try to select types, type sizes, and line lengths that work together for maximum flexibility and efficiency in terms of how a line of type can be adjusted to avoid wide wordspacing.
So it is with a sort of “coming home” feeling that I will begin my first layout-only job in a while.
April 18th, 2010
I enjoyed the initial design and layout of my first medical novel. Although only the first pass is complete, with corrections and changes sure to come, the best part of the creative bump is likely over. I had begun two other books while working on that novel. And I fielded other inquiries in a typical “feast” portion of the feast-or-famine freelancer’s way.
One of the other possible projects was a 500-page scifi novel. This was another potentially interesting project, though I cannot imagine it would have had as many different text elements as the medical novel. But that has led me to thinking in a different, if not new, direction: eBooks.
I’ve already gone on some about how my first exercises with the epub and mobi formats left me underwhelmed. But those, it occurred to me, don’t even scratch the surface of what a proper eBook might be. Naturally, it took the iPad—no, I have not purchased one yet, as I’m waiting for second generation, which, at the least, I expect to include a video camera—to get me thinking about the extended possibilities of eBooks.
By “extended,” I picture the ability, while reading, say, a science fiction novel about time travel, to link to material about what physics says about the possibility of traveling through time. I am not sure whether I want multimedia to be part of the material one can access, as it could distract from the reading and might make a book into more of a movie experience over time. But I also like the idea of having other material available to move on to for more information when the reader’s imagination is piqued.
As it happened, this science fiction novel didn’t happen for me. I could not agree on a price with the prospective client. I understood perfectly the financial constraints he found himself bound by, but I could not bring the project in for what he could spend. And, interestingly, that price included the cost of proofreading. I wonder whether, whatever the price, it is a good idea for the same one pair of eyes to handle the typesetting and proofreading?
March 21st, 2010
I believe I’ve said and written it before: I like working on two books at once. They each provide breaks from the other, thus keeping me fresh and the work seeming new—or newer than it would otherwise seem.
Having worked this way a few times in the past, I know it is rare for two books to keep the same pace; but this only adds to that sense of variety that prevents me from falling into a rut. Right now, however, I have three books in production, albeit one of the three just barely. All three are interior page design and layout jobs.
The first is a novel. Short of a textbook, it is one of the most elaborate books that I have ever worked on. It is filled with many different kinds of narrative: basic text, as well as letters, articles, and certain unique pieces of copy.
The second book is a memoir. Written by a retired physicist from India who has lived and worked in U.S. a number of years, it is also meant as a serious aid to preserving the Sanskrit language. This book is less about many different kinds of design elements, the way the first book is, and more with the proper use of diacritics and the typesetting of transliterated characters.
And the third book is a lot more like many of the books I have worked on over the years. It is a new edition of a book that was set in a fairly straightforward manner the first time around. The idea is to produce more attractive pages, while maintaining the usability as the student guide that it is.
Predictably, each has a different kind of schedule. The novel and all its materials are in-house. I have taken up the basic design, laying out the first part of this lengthy work. I await the client’s feedbackbefore plunging into the whole layout. With the Indian memoir, I have gotten only as far as acclimating myself to he transliterated characters and diacritic. As of this writing, I received the finalized first chapter to begin setting type. As for the third book, I await approval of the design and all materials.
And so it will be a matter of working on what I have in-house at any time. Right now, the novel is most ready for production. But as each client sends me more material, I will work on portions of each. The one organizational rule I will maintain is to try to always have a significant page of pages in the hands of each client, so that we are all in some state of doing. And that is how I will complete three books in roughly the same time.
March 10th, 2010
I remember … my first book, actually, seventeen years ago. I started with straight layout jobs; I didn’t begin to design books for years after that beginning. That first layout job was a math textbook. A good fit, as it happened, since I had earned a living as a proofreader—both in-house and freelance—for about fifteen years before that.
A math textbook, before I knew about MathType or XTensions for creating equations, meant a lot of cutting and pasting radical symbols, indicating square roots, combining many characters, and a world of back-kerning.
The autobiography/memoir I am currently working on reminded me of that first math book. Written by a retired physicist, an older gentleman who began life in India, is also the author’s attempt to preserve his native language. What this means—thank heavens not learning Sanskrit—is using one or more typefaces that transliterate the Sanskrit into English.
And so specialized fonts are in order. But there is the additional factor, really a kind of monkeywrench to overcome, of my working on the Macintosh platform—you may have heard me mention this before—and the author and editor working on PCs. This effectively throws us into further translation mode. Even though all three of us have purchased the appropriate fonts, the textfiles I have received to this point, and the printouts I had received until just yesterday, all had accented characters missing or replaced by tiny outlined squares.
I will need a complete copy of the manuscript and, interestingly, this job will force me to do something I’ve scrupulously avoided to this point: reading a book through as I work on designing and laying it out. It is now imperative I follow through, line by line and even character by character, typing in every missing character. Without the hard copy it will be a lot like Plato’s example of the distorted picture of reality one gets from observing the world only via shadows projected onto a cave wall.
How I wish these typefaces would just apply upon my importing the textfiles that have been created and worked on with the PC version of the fonts. Hopefully, just that will happen—if not magically, than by something we figure out—before I get too much deeper into this project.
February 21st, 2010
The use of type in books—choosing and combining it with other typefaces—brings the art vs. craft of book design, compared to typography, right to the fore.
Joel Friedlander writes a thoughtful piece, 3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book, on the subject, from the matching perspective, it seems to me. I take another look here, from the contrasting end.
Starting with the premise that main body type has been chosen—perhaps by period and/or place, by the look of the typeface simply seeming somehow representative of the subject, or by the type’s appearance running counter to what the book is about—the very next thing is to choose a second face for display and all other non-body text uses.
For instance, last year I did interior and cover design and layout on a book named The Sutton-Taylor Feud: The Deadliest Blood Feud in Texas. It told the story of an epic family feud that began shortly after the Civil War ended and lasted past into the last decade of the nineteenth century. When I first began talking to the publisher about this book the expression “of biblical proportion” came to mind. From that, it was easy for me to start looking at old style serif types. But also cognizant that the time period wasn’t truly back to the old style era, from about 1495 through about 1725, I wanted something that was a more contemporary turn on an old style. Sabon fits the bill, as it is old style but was created by one of the masters, Jan Tschichold, “in the period 1964–1967,” according to Wikipedia.
Given that this book has Texas roots, I decided to go with a typeface that had a Western feel to it for the only non-body text elements of this book that require a display face. In the sample below, that would be the large initial cap, in Rosewood Standard Regular.
Coincidentally, I recently finished another book with historical overtones, and—again, coincidentally—though from a different publishing client, the client was another college press in Texas. This book had a whole different tone from the first. Lust, Violence, Religion: Life in Historic Waco is a sometimes bawdy, always a good read. And I did my best to make it a good- and interesting-looking book.
I chose a typeface for body text that again went with the notion of historical import—a small wink at the aforementioned bawdy character of the essays—Adobe Jenson Pro. When researching this face, the word “elegant” comes up again and again. Jenson is simply beautiful, a revival of Renaissance lines and curves. It gives weight to the subject matter it presents and, again, this seemed to fit nicely with the unexpectedly irreverent storyline (for, history or not, the book reads as entertainingly as any great story).
For the accompanying sans serif—to be used in titles, display heads, and captions—I selected Optima. Not strictly a sans, of course, Optima’s hint of serifs, tapered strokes, and slightly larger x-height than the Jenson all keep with the elegant look I had in mind for this book. Below is a page Lust, Violence, Religion.
These are just two ways to go about pairing, but not exactly matching, type.
January 31st, 2010
I think that a three-column layout is really sort of a book design specialty. The one- and two-column set-ups are a lot more usual. The more limited three-column layout seems to work primarily in two kinds of books: textbooks using two even columns plus a third, narrower column for display items, such as subheads appearing to extend into the margin past the body text area, footnotes, or captions; and coffee table books of photo-essays.
I recently completed a modified version of the latter. Although not as large as the traditional, oversized coffee table book, this one featured a three-column grid that allowed photographs to run in quite a few different ways, occupying parts of, all of, and bleeding off, the page.
The same caveat as with two-column layouts—setting type so as not to make dense, dark pages—holds. Three columns make for two gutters, however, thus presenting another variable amount of white space to figure into this equation, along with the margins.
This kind of page layout works particularly well with a landscape page orientation—that is, a page that is wider than it is tall. The book I worked on recently that used this kind of format is on pages in a barely landscape orientation of 9.25 inches by 8.75 inches. The two gutters measure 16 points each and the text columns are about 13p10 each. The margins are generous but not overly so. For the leading I also went generous, 15 points for 11-point type. For alignment I went with something suited to narrow columns, ragged right, instead of fully justified, text.
And that winds up the usual options for the number of columns in a book design, unless you’re going to go some novelty arrangement with more than three columns.
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