People often ask me, “How can you tell if a book has been designed by an amateur? I mean, it’s just a book, right?” This reminds me of the author whose book I was designing a few years ago, who asked me, “Book design? What’s there to...
Using type ornaments in your book design can add a pleasing pictorial element to your typographic pages. Depending on the tone you’re trying to establish with your design, there’s likely to be a choice of ornaments that will complement the other choices...
Two recent projects have reminded me of just how much attention book designers have to pay to details. With a complex book, every detail counts. What makes a book “complex”? It could be very long manuscripts, books with footnotes, endnotes, annotations,...
When book designers or typographers talk about the “color” of a page of type, they don’t mean the colors printed on the page. In fact, this term often comes up in discussing purely black and white typographic layouts. In this case,...
I read on a grammar blog recently that “…the em dash is named after its length—it’s about the same width as the capital letter M.” This is a common error that arises from the fact that in many fonts, the capital “M” is the widest letter,...
