Posts filed under 'design books'
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.
July 21st, 2007
Big can o’ worms! Bigger than I could have imagined. Opened a world of shaky ground for myself when I stated with such certainty that my first rule of book design is to stand, more or less, in the shadows and simply bring the author’s work to the reader. My interior pages are merely receptacles for the author’s words and any illustrations—that has been my guiding principle for about fifteen years of design and layout work.
Pause … while I laugh and restrain myself from writing exactly the way I tend to speak—or tawk, as I was, after all, born and raised in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn—and ask myself out loud, using much less polite language: “Who on earth do you think you are, self, prattling on about making pages as if that were the same as discovering a cure for all cancers during a break from solving the problem of world poverty.
Okay, there, I’m back from making fun of just how serious I can sound about this jazz of book design.
So, like, Liz Tufte of Signature Bookworks has brought one David Carson to my attention. I have not yet checked out his book design work or anything he may have written on the subject. But Liz writes, commenting on a comment of mine in response to a blog entry of hers entitled What is Book Design?, that
Designer David Carson … isn’t interested in merely delivering the author’s message; he wants to be equal partners with the author.
And, like, that rather appeals to me. In fact, the way I put it in my last comment to her comments to my comment was:
God help me for being so egotistical—Lordy! How the notion of being “equal partners with the author” appeals to me!
There’s just a few tiny details to work out. First, what would such a partnership look like for me? I remember how when I first became aware of the expression “desktop publishing” years ago, and about when I got my first Macintosh and laser printer, I began to notice examples of a typesetting style, if you could call it that, where every variation of every font that the typesetter had on his or her computer was used—simply because they could. I see no danger of that for me. But, then, who knows what crazed way I might try to carve out my own territory in someone else’s book if I were to take that chance.
Better to take some more time reading some more background and then considering again what I mean to be accomplishing by my book design and layout work. I began a month or so back, re-reading Designing books: practice and theory. Then I picked up Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography. Next was Ellen Lupton’s thinking with type. This last one was an easy read, fun even. And after that, based on the mention by Jacqueline Simonds in her answers to my “Four Questions,” I read Colin Wheildon’s Type and Layout. She was right, by the way, that there’s a relation between the amount of laughter Wheildon draws out of you and your degree of book design geekiness.
July 14th, 2007
Sitting down at the marina having lunch, something I’ve been doing solo lately, I squinted as the bright sunlight reflected off the white pages of the book I was trying to read. It took some effort, as distractions abounded. There were the seagulls, noisy as ever, and a raft of senior citizens lunching with each other and their grandkids. But mostly there was the glare of the white-hot sun on the white pages.
I opened the book, Eileen Lupton’s wise and witty thinking with type, to the page I was up to, somewhere in the middle. It turned out to be page 102 of 176. And I read from the book: “Paragraphs do not occur in nature.”
Paragraphs do not occur in nature?
I exploded with laughter. All the grandparents and their grandkids stared at me. I tried to remember when I had last heard something that came out sounding so funny. Forget the sense it made. I imagined a professorial voice explaining how commas were no longer found in the wild, either.
The point is that all we regard now as “the rules”: grammar, spelling, the dos and don’ts of typography are human constructs that gained some kind of agreed-upon legitimacy over time and by the consent of people who knew enough to make a call on what was to be regarded as the standard.
In the book I was reading over lunch the other day, that sentence I found so funny was a lead-in to some discussion and illustration of different ways that new paragraphs are set off from the ones preceding them. The two ways that we use most regularly these days are the indent and a line space between paragraphs. To see the others, you should just pick up a copy of thinking with type.
What stayed with me of what I read was the notion that one very important reason to learn the rules of an endeavor is so we can break them in a knowing and intelligent way. That, I decided, is the best explanation of why I am steeping myself in books on typography and page layout in what turns out to be a return to summer as the slowest season for freelance book design and page makeup work. Last summer proved an exception I had hoped would continue: in 2006 I was busy from May through December.
I kept going back to the book. But the bits and pieces of conversations that I overheard distracted me. Involuntarily I tried to hear in paragraphs. The only time I felt I succeeded was when I listened to two middle-aged me complain about a third. They spoke in short, angry outbursts, using creative obscenities. Each pronouncement detailing something else they disliked about the person they spoke of stood out alone, just fine, as a short, discrete paragraph. Natural, even.
