The Book Designer

Practical advice to help build better books

The Elements of Bad Typography

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Editor’s Note: As more examples of “bad typography” appear, I’ll continue to update this article. And hey, you can send me your own examples for inclusion, too. (See the end of the article. Last edit on June 15, 2017.) Typography of one sort or another is all around us. And that’s why bad typography is […]

Free Instruction for Authors: An Abundance of Awesomeness

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Hey, it’s the depths of summer here in the northern hemisphere. You know what that means: long days at the pool with the kids; vacation notices bouncing back from my emails; work days that seem to end a lot sooner than in other months. Over here at The Book Designer world headquarters, we rarely take […]

Book Design: The Architecture of the Book Page

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Book pages, especially early in the design and construction of your book, are architectural in that they contain basic structural elements that need to be built on strong foundations, allow for ornamentation where appropriate, and pay attention to the execution of the book’s function of transmitting information from author to reader. Well, that was a […]

Book Title Pages: 500 Years of Inspiration

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Ed. note: This post (part of the Book Construction Blueprint series) was briefly published on February 2, 2010, and removed a few hours later. After hitting the “Publish” button I realized there were numerous images in the post that needed more than attribution, they needed permission from the rights holder. In this case, that was […]

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"Writers change the world one reader at a time. But you can't change the world with a book that's still on your hard drive or in a box under your bed. This blog exists to help you get that book into people's hands."
—Joel Friedlander

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