One of the projects I’m working on is a memoir of growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a very personal but fascinating look at childhood in another time and place, and I’ll talk more about this book when it’s published, but it’s a great example of setting up a straight narrative book page layout. […]
Apple iPad Typography: Fonts We Actually Want
We haven’t seen much of the Apple iPad yet, and the screen shots we have seen show that the fonts for the Apple iPad are perhaps not all they might be. What do we know? Apple, as far as I know, has issued only the one press release on the day of the product’s announcement, […]
4 Incredible Free Sources for Photos to Use in Your Book or Blog
There’s been an ongoing discussion in the comments to the post on Fair Use and Copyright, and it seemed like a good time to explore some of the resources readily available that can supply images for use in blog posts or books without fear of infringing someone else’s copyright. The most common explanation I hear […]
Project Focus: The Poetry of the Typography of Poetry
One of the great pleasures of being a book designer is getting to work on books by my friends. There’s a unique form of collaboration that happens when I work with someone I know well, and the book usually shows the result of this process. In 1999 I had the pleasure of helping my friend […]
3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book
The typefaces we use for books are a real contradiction. They can be so quiet you just don’t notice them. But if you enlarge the letters, you can see right away that they are full of idiosyncrasies and flourishes. Display typefaces, on the other hand, announce themselves to the reader in no uncertain terms. In […]
Apple iPad: E-Book Reading, Kindle-Killing, Business-Saving Product of the Century?
I have to say that watching today’s launch by Apple of the new iPad was quite entertaining. I picked Gizmodo which had a team of four or five people live blogging from the hall and taking photos of the visuals Steve Jobs was using in his presentation. You really have to admire not only the […]
Readability and a Lifelong Lesson for Beginning Book Designers
Despite the explosive growth of audio and video on the internet, content on the web is still largely text. And reading online can be a difficult experience. I don’t know about you, but some of the sites I read online—blogs, content sites, news sites, article sites—are really difficult. Small san serif type in grey on […]
22 Top Book Designer Tasks for Getting Your Self-Published Book Into Print
I frequently get asked what exactly a book designer does. Just the other day I spoke with a client whose book is in copyediting. I’ll be getting ready to start work on his interior next week. “Well, do you need to do anything,” he asked. “I mean, there’s just a couple of formats, right?” I […]
Warning: Even “A-List” Bloggers Need Book Designers
A new promotion for bloggers got a lot of traffic last month as the Beyond Blogging launch rolled out. This product, from bloggers Nathan Hagan and Mike Cliff Jones, assembles interviews and case studies of over a dozen “A-list” bloggers into a 204-page PDF ebook. Along with the book purchasers receive a full-scale blog consulting […]
Going Undercover—The Story of Knock-Off
The call came one day while I was trying to squeeze a giant squid into a 7″ x 10″ book. I was working on Search for the Giant Squid for Lyons Press, and some of those fellas are pretty big, so big I was wrestling with the idea of turning the book sideways, not something […]