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 book page color, 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, “color” means the overall gray...
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, often the same...
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...
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...