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 in his own life, and passes along a bit of wisdom from his Jewish cultural background.
Determining the Design Needs
The manuscript was pretty straightforward, and perfectly clean, thanks to the incredibly high level work of PeopleSpeak, Sharon Goldinger’s terrific team of editors. There was one level of subheads, a section of photos and epigraphs at the heads of each chapter.
Note: These are clickable images that will display a full-size page if you’d like to get a closer look.
Here are the three designs that emerged from the design process. Variation one, with the Minion and Lithos fonts:
Variation two, with Poppl-Laudatio and Janson text:
And variation three, with Electra and Bernhard Modern:
In the end, the design that was used in the book was a combination of elements, adjusted to bring the parts into balance:
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