This is a project we’re about to finish for a new customer, a small publisher: a poetry book for children.

Poems are very delicate creatures, and normally I wouldn’t dare manipulate the layout of poetry. However, the client specifically requested a book designer’s approach for the typography and layout.

By reading the poems I realized that each one had its own individual identity within the whole group of poems. I thought it would be interesting to bring out the story of each poem by using the typography to reinforce that unique character or situation.

I envisioned a book that the reader would find engaging & attractive to the eye. So, I mixed text and illustration by allowing the lettering to form parts of the illustration.

TARGET AUDIENCE & FONT SIZE:

One of the reasons I started looking for alternatives to the more traditional approach was that the publisher wanted her target audience to be children from 6 to 12 years old. Six-year-olds need bigger font than 12-year-olds. Using different font sizes throughout the book opens the book to a broader audience, whereas setting all the text in one size would target a more specific age group.

B&W

Since the book will be printed in black ink only, a few pages with black background sprinkled throughout the book is a good option for breaking the black on white (caution! you need to discuss this option with your printer).

BTW, this book is not just for real estate professionals. It’s a fantastic book on photography for anyone.

Ceci did the illustrations for the novel (and, yes, it’s adult literary fiction with illustrations). We’re also in the processing of building Ellen’s website. Her novel will be released by Henry Holt in the summer of 2010. I’m going to have more posts about the developing of Ellen’s author website, but for now you can look at the preview page at ellenbryson.com.

Publishers Weekly has a great list of books promoted by publishers and literary agencies at this year’s fair. Here’s the brief on Ellen Bryson’s novel:

On the adult fiction front, Foundry has the debut novel The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson (Holt, 2010); set in 1865 New York, the book follows the titular character—he performs as the “living skeleton” in P.T. Barnum’s American museum—whose life is changed after being hired by Barnum to be the showman’s personal detective.

Stay tuned for more posts. I’ll be making brief posts about many of our current and recent projects while Ceci will offer more in-depth posts examining specific design aspects.

We believe that a book’s design should reflect the author’s voice as well as the concept that the author wants to transmit. Cover art & page layout are all parts of the message that the book is attempting to communicate. A book’s design presents the way through which the reader interacts with the text. Done wrong, a book’s design (or lack of design) can turn an engaging text into a boring and monotonous read. Of course, on the other extreme, poorly conceived page layout composition results in a book design that intrudes on the reader’s enjoyment.

As a boutique book design studio we craft each book carefully, dedicating the time that each book needs without rushing into random ideas.

We usually design the cover first since that’s the first contact the potential reader has with the book. Once we have designed the style for the cover, then we start on the interior page layout. In the page composition we purposefully incorporate some elements from the cover design so that the overall result is a book with cover and interior that presents a unified style, making the book a stronger and unique presentation.

When working on page layout, we seek to find a harmonious relationship between the fonts in the different parts of the text. Also, an integral part of book layout is balancing the text with the surrounding white space. We actually think of the white space as containing the text. Certainly, a simpler approach is just to dump the text into a template. But that method doesn’t work well for a non-fiction book that utilizes many elements, e.g., images, tables.

Most importantly we strive to work with the publisher (or author in case of self-publishers) to transmit the spirit of that particular book as a one & only piece that will provide an engaging experience for the reader.

This doesn’t mean that the process is long, sometimes is only a few weeks. We just think this is a good direction and it works for us and our clients.

From the back cover:
This is not your typical parenting book.
“How Tall Is the Easter Bunny?” takes you on a humorous romp through 51 questions that as an adult, you would never think to ask. The authors posed them to parents like you, and came up with some unexpected results:
“The Tooth Fairy sells teeth to dentists, pirates and witch doctors.”
“Santa’s favorite food is beer and enchiladas.”
Hilarious responses such as these, along with “tips from the pros” and actual bitter-sweet personal stories make this truly a one-of-a-kind humor book you won’t want to put down.

The authors Dan & Danielle Morton did research, surveys, and interviews to hundreds of parents to get all sorts of answers to their questions, and I wanted to reflect that in the book.

HIERARCHY

The book has a number of elements interacting in the page, making the separation of elements into different categories important for finding the right style & font:

• section number & title
• chapter number & title
• main text
• quotes within text
• charts
• lists
• humor illustrations
• vector illustrations*
• tips from the pros throughout the text
• real stories section at the end of each chapter
• pullquotes

* I suggested to add the vector illustrations later to break the monotony of the grayscale illustrations and text.


When working on layout we want to find a harmonious relation between the different elements interacting in a double page: fonts in the different parts of the text, the blocks of text with the images, and these elements with the space that contains it. At the same time we try for it not to be monotonous or boring, but neither noisy. Contrast is the key, and finding the right contrast between the elements is what will make it easier or harder on the eye.

STYLE

The humorous nature of the book made me think of comics and the way each scene in a comic is presented as a frame. Then I started to think of each question (i.e., chapter) as a scene. I tried a few hand-drawn frames but that didn’t work since the beginnings and ends started to bump into each other. Finally, I decided to keep the comic concept but use it in a more simple way: to “frame” the pages.

For the front matter & section dividers I used a thick frame, while in the interior pages the frame was a hairline:

TYPOGRAPHY

I wanted a strong face for the headers, and after trying many geometric possibilities I found Zuzana Licko’s Modula, which different weights & variants made the elements have their own style while maintaining the same style. For the text I used the neo-grotesque Whitney in lightweight.

GRID

For a book with so many elements, the grid is essential: it will define the width of the elements and help distribute the space within the page, which allows the elements to flow in a systematic manner.

This project was quite complicated, and changed concept a few times. And since I started working on the cover long before the layout, as the layout progressed I had to work back and forth on the cover as I wanted cover and layout to be consistent.
To transmit the idea of workbook and implying interaction I used some of the elements from the interior of the book like the dashed lines, Escher drawings, etc.

And here some of the earlier drafts (even one with a change in the title!):

Nielsen believes that “the ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites….”

Relationship to book design? Designing a non-fiction book is much more stimulating to a book designer than designing a book of fiction since non-fiction offers many more elements for engaging the reader, e.g., diagrams, images, block quotes, pull quotes, captions, sub-headings. These elements all add a level of interaction with the content that changes the way a person reads a book.

Yet, this enriched interaction with a text does not translate smoothly to reflowable e-book formats (e.g., Kindle, ePub, etc.).

To compensate Nielsen advises, and I think this is a very important statement in his article:

“For Kindle, it’s certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can’t repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures.”

Read this part again: “But you can’t repurpose website content, either.” There’s an irony behind that since the underlying format behind Kindle & ePub is HTML & CSS.

Well, this should certainly keep writers, editors, and designers busy. But is it cost-effective for a publisher?

Or are lower-cost, mostly automated, quick-&-dirty conversions good enough for users that prefer mobile devices and reflowable text? Or, good enough for now until this market shakes out over the course of the next few years and we all see what device and formats are really going to dominate? In 5 years perhaps the Kindle will be nothing more than a netbook, and in that case we’re back to using PDF and/or designing for Web browsers and creating a stylesheet for mobile devices.

Is This Insanity?

From a strategic standpoint the difficulty of a publisher designing for the Kindle is that in the mid-1990s we entered an age of continuously redesigning content. Or as Nielsen says, “It’s simply the 1995 lesson updated to a 2009 device.” And I’m only referring to digital content, not the porting of print to digital. But what happens with the 2010 device, the 2011 device, the 2012 device? Evolving technological capabilities have kept Web designers gainfully employed for years now.

As a person running a design firm I should be an enthusiastic champion for specifically redesigning books for Kindle. But just as Web sites are often redesigned every few years to incorporate new features offered by advances in technology, will we see e-books redesigned every few years? Or should the focus be elsewhere, such as thinking about how to create original digital content that doesn’t have a corresponding print component? Or perhaps the print component of digital content is a deeper, more engaging examination of the topic? Or any of several other possibilities. But continually redesigning the same material into different formats isn’t progress.

Awakening Possibility is a book I designed a few months ago. The author described it as a ‘self-help book (workbook) on career and life planning‘, and the manuscript was about 66-page Word doc and I was asked to make it in about a 150-page book.
After reading the book I realized that it had a lot of ‘visualizing work’, so I thought that having a book with lots of white space fit the purpose of making it to the page count and also went very well to the content by leaving open space as a means for thinking and reflecting.

ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK

Being a workbook, there was not only text but many other elements to design: workbook pages to be completed by the reader, along with diagrams, charts, exercises, etc. Below a little look at the original manuscript. (Several of the textual elements in the manuscript that were converted graphically can be seen in the last two images of this post.)

GRID

I proposed a 2 column layout: a wide one for the text and a thin one for full width to be used with the elements mentioned before. Two thin blocks to the sides were used on the right for chapter title and on the left for folios (book title, page number & author).

TEXT ON THE PAGE

The column width is about 70 characters, and the text block is justified to add to the overall ‘clean feel’.

The main typeface was Filosofia by Zuzana Licko: Filosofia Roman 10/15 for the text (yes, generous leading) and Filosofia Unicase for the chapters. Looking for a typeface to combine with Filosofia, I found that ITC Conduit could work, designed by Mark van Bronkhorst. ITC Conduit is the opposite of the contemporary-modern roman Filosofia and with a wide range of variants for all the elements required (headings, diagrams, etc).

FORMATTING THE TEXT

Some of the elements were interesting to reformat, like this list that got formatted as a tag cloud:

I also added some ornaments to complement a few pages, which relate to the content (Escher’s drawings). Here are some double pages of the final design:

In an earlier post I mentioned using the font Brothers for the cover. So when working on the layout, the idea was (& always is) to relate the layout with the cover to unify the book.

Having the Brothers font on the cover, I thought that I would like to find a good text font to go with it: something masculine, geometric, but at the same time highly readable. (Remember that usability always must be in mind when designing a book: the book is meant to be read!)
The chapter headings and small ornaments were also set in Brothers, and for the main text, the choice was Melior by Hermann Zapf. After trying some other fonts, Melior fit the bill: the geometric rectangle based font went perfectly with Brothers.

For the front matter I started to incorporate Melior, always combined with Brothers Bold & Regular. (In the image is the horizontal design for the TOC & Dedication page.)

BTW, The Imperfect Enjoyment has its own website, which I found very amusing… featuring Barack Obama!