Book Design: Beauty in the Details

BookDesignGirl 2 months, 1 week ago on Twitter

"Interior book design - the most self-effacing kind of design. When it works, it’s almost invisible." http://tinyurl.com/yfdq85g #bookdesign

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Book design: beauty in the details « Design in Mind 3 months ago on Wordpress

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Joel Friedlander 3 months ago on Wordpress

@Emily No, I hadn’t seen it before, just looked at Amazon. An amazing piece of work, I think the designer/illustrator Ben Gibson should get a lot of credit. I’ve done many books with illustrations, charts, graphs, diagrams, sidebars and (the real challenge for a designer) more than 1 text “stream,” but never anything this whimsical. Loved the copyright page also. Certainly this is a book designed page by page, and although I’m sure it was a challenge as you say, it must also have been delightful to do something so different from the ordinary book. Probably one of the closest in my experience was a whole series of books I designed years ago for Lyons Press that were compilations of the columns in the NYTimes Science Section (The Science Times Book of Fish etc.) but they were not as idiosyncratic as this book. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Also loved your “corpus/libris” shots, good fun!

@Linda Jay, thanks for your kind comment.

@Mary, on screen typography is radically different than print typography, and just one of the reasons most people don’t “justify” their copy is because the same content has to adjust to many operating systems, browsers, and programs that are used to display type on screen. On paper, once you get it right it’s finished and the printed version will never change. ... See all content Hide content

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mariaschneider 3 months ago on Twitter

Happy to see so many people are still interested in book design. The paper kind at that! http://bit.ly/14Ebbz

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DorleeM 3 months ago on Twitter

Book Design: Beauty in the Details @JFbookman @mariaschneider http://bit.ly/3ewz6U #authors #writers #pubtips

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ashetler 3 months ago on Twitter

Book Design: Beauty in the Details http://bit.ly/3lHwwy (via Editor Unleashed @mariaschneider) #books #design

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Joel Friedlander 3 months ago on Wordpress

@Dave Those ebooks are pretty challenging. I find the state of the art at the moment sorely lacking. What I see on a Kindle or Sony Reader, although readable, is akin to airy white bread. Nothing wrong with it, but I don’t want to read that every day and I don’t think it’s much of a replacement for the unique character a book has intrinsically.

Maybe they’ll find a way to port PDFs over to ereaders. That would be interesting.

(Make a right at San Quentin) ... See all content Hide content

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trendydesign 3 months ago on Twitter

Book Design: Beauty in the Details: by Joel Friedlander. Read books that you enjoy The first bo.. http://bit.ly/4DzSBr #trendy #design

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Dave Doolin 3 months ago on Wordpress

Joel, too many people don’t care about book design anymore. I love it.

Right now I’m struggling with an ebook design. It’s going to have to have at least some of the elements people expect in ebooks (like it or not), but I’m really picky about readability. Dangerous Curve in LA composed the initial TeX layout, which I’m pretty happy with. I’ll be spending quite some time tweaking it from there.

Looking forward to reading more. (And I might wander in anonymously from across the Richmond Bridge one day) ... See all content Hide content

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Stephen Tiano 3 months ago on Wordpress

Well done, Joel. I agree with pretty much all you said. I can’t stress enough how much I believe that interior page design is, in my considered opinion, supposed to be a silent art. That is, since the two most important people in the design of a book’s pages are the reader and the author. Nothing we do as book designers ought to call attention away from what the author is trying to bring to the reader, thru us designers.

This is such a hard thing to do really well when you add into the mix a desire for interesting-looking, even attractive, pages. Cover design is where the designer can let go a little bit, have some fun, and leave one’s thumbprint. As long as one observes the fundamental point that the cover is first charged with the task of getting the prospective reader to pick up the book and that it also makes a kind of promise as to what the reader will find inside–both in terms of the subject and the writing, as well as the styling of the pages.

Strangely, perhaps, the relationship between book cover and interior mimics, for me, the relationship between drama and comedy. Drama, like book covers, get the attention. But interiors and comedy, taken less seriously and for granted, are the more difficult trick to pull off.

I also find it alarming that self-publishing authors often don’t understand the importance of professional book design. Now, I’ve worked with a few really savvy self-publishers who get that and who understand that paying a professional book designer is an investment in their baby. But I correspond all the time with authors who want to nickel-and-dime on design and then still expect to buck the trend of selling, on average, something less than 100 copies of a self-published book.

I always find it interesting to read or hear what other book designers regard as the essential design elements for a book. Although when I first began to read and re-read Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and Hochuli and Kinross’s Designing books, I was somewhat skeptical about the “formulae” in each for shaping out the text area. But my continual referring to those two books (as well as Hendel’s On Book Design for the process of designing books), has led me to an appreciation of some of the classically-based “recipes” for coming up with the proportions of the text area on a printed page. And this–including the size of the page–is the first essential I decide on when beginning to design a book’s interior. After that it is typeface, type size, and leading, the line length handled in my first essential element.

I wonder how receptive self-publishers at-large are to learning about this? ... See all content Hide content

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Joanne Bolton 3 months ago on Wordpress

Joel, once again you have given us something to chew on! Thanks for the background and I totally agree that reading suspends our reality and allows us to escape into the world of the imagination. It isn’t really known yet how digital reality works. We know books work for us, but we don’t really know whether or not digital substitutions are working in the same way or even in a useful way . Thought provoking as usual! Keep up the good word. ... See all content Hide content

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Julie Duck 3 months ago on Wordpress

Speaking of readability, I TRIED to read a beauty book by a well-known makeup artist from a TLC makeover show (wink-wink). Couldn’t get through the book because the layout was horrendous, with GIANT FONTS and little fonts, some sans serif, some serif. My eyes were bugging out and I put the book down, never to reopen it again. Design is crucial.

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Meryl K Evans 3 months ago on Wordpress

@RKCharron, I hadn’t read Hush, Hush… so I looked it up on Amazon’s preview pages. That’s awful. The typeface does distract you. Bad choice.

I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t like to read some of the books by how the font looked in size and style.

Publishers worked hard to produce high quality content — font should be the easiest thing to get right. I’ve seen some less traditional fonts that worked well — so there’s nothing wrong with trying something a little different as long as the readability is still there. ... See all content Hide content

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Sharon Goldinger 3 months ago on Wordpress

Great article, Joel. It’s obvious you know your stuff. You’ve been and continue to be a great teacher on this subject. Thanks.

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Tom Millea 3 months ago on Wordpress

Thank you for that wonderful article! I have seen so many articles on how to make a book exotic but almost none on how to make it readable! The info here is what I need to know and more of it please!

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jfbookman 3 months ago on Twitter

Book Design: Beauty in the Details: Guest post at @mariaschneider blog Editor Unleashed: http://ow.ly/zCXO

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mariaschneider 3 months ago on Twitter

Book Design: Details Matter (guest post by @JFbookman) http://bit.ly/16jhD8

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