The Spirit of the River (affiliate link) is a terrific novel by Diane McCarthy, published by her own Cloudland Press. I met Diane at an all-day publishing workshop run by the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) where we are both members.
After I finished the book I decided to redesign the cover. Now this [...]
From the category archives:
Samples
This is the second article about dealing with a cover design project with artwork supplied by the client. In the first, I looked at the book cover design process for Chris Finlan’s Not A Fire Exit. This time I’m going to look at the designs prepared for Bill Goldberg’s The “And” Principle.
Here is the artwork [...]
Over the last few months I’ve designed two book covers that involved artwork supplied by the author. This is a slightly unusual situation and forces you to think in creative ways. If your client hands you a piece of artwork and says, “I love this! I want it on my book cover,” then you had [...]
This new novel by first-time author Christopher Finlan is an exciting read. Chris wanted a clean page layout that let readers really enjoy the text.
In designing novels particularly, it’s important that none of the design elements used to add visual interest to the page interrupt the flow of the narrative. Of course, readers engaged in [...]
Books come in all different shapes and sizes and with many different purposes. Book design takes these diverse uses into account.
Recently we designed Noah Alper’s Business Mensch, which combines memoir with business advice drawn from the author’s career as an entrepreneur. Along the way Noah tells numerous fascinating stories about the ups and downs [...]
For offset printing, 2-color covers can be much more economical than 4-color covers, particularly for short-run books.
I discussed two 2-color covers for self-published books in a previous article and explained why these covers are often preferred by publishers. Here I look at two covers done for trade publishers.
This first cover was designed for a [...]
Before the advent of digital printing and print-on-demand production, publishers had no choice but to print on offset presses, and most books today continue to be printed by offset.
Book presses are large, noisy, oily pieces of heavy machinery. There are separate parts of the press for each color that will be printed, with separate sets [...]
One of the first books I produced for Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco was The Age of Participation by Patricia McLagan and Christo Nel.
The overarching framework of the story of the movement of politics toward participative governance required a theme to hold the parts together yet show their relationship to the whole. These part-opening pages [...]
Some years ago I was asked to redesign the journal of the Swedenborg Foundation, Chrysalis. This journal presents essays, art, and spiritually-oriented material for their worldwide membership.
The new design was clean and organized, and in the process I began a series of cover designs that went on for numerous issues. We needed to create a [...]
For a while clients seemed to be asking for a lot of small, square books. I had done several of these and noticed some similarities in their design.
Some types of book are square to accommodate both horizontal and vertical subject matter. A good example is art books of all kinds, paintings, photographs, etchings all benefit [...]
