Update: Now, with sample pages!

Ever since I tried to roughly describe how I go about designing a book, my process has been changing. Mostly, it’s because I keep getting asked to design books (1) for which I don’t have an electronic file, and (2) that need to be shot down to mass-market size. In the last six weekdays, I did 3.5 designs, and I had electronic files for only the 0.5 part. The transmittal forms for two of these books said they were to be designed so that they could be shot down. What does this mean?
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Update: Now, with pictures!

All right, kids. You like details? Here are some details.

Pick up three hardcover books, preferably from different publishers, and remove the dust jackets. Look at the spines. Do you see the title, author, and publisher’s name or logo stamped on each spine in metallic foil? Probably. Are the colors of the foil different—e.g., one’s silver, one’s gold, one’s copper? Right. Somebody picked those. And actually there are many shades of silver, gold, and copper to choose from—not to mention colored metallics and matte colors. Somebody designed the stamp—a die—to print the spine, too. Some publishers like to have it complement the interior design; others like for it to echo the jacket.

Spines of three of the more interestingly bound books in my possession. The top is from 1816. The middle is undated but probably from 1900 or 1901, based on cues in the content; it’s blind-stamped. The bottom is from 1954 and has raised cords.
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Sorry, I’ve forgotten what train of linkage led me to it, but More or less via LiveClever, here are two articles by Mark Boulton that are kind of on what I was mumbling about to Michelle last week:

Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML gap

Designers, Engage Your Brain[s]

Another article worth checking out is his Web designer’s guide to print design.

Checking some proofs the other day, an error leaped out at me. Appearing on the acknowledgments page, I couldn’t help noticing this dangling modifier:

Like all other authors . . . , there are many others who helped me get this book together.

Leading a paragraph in which the author thanks his two proofreaders, I needn’t point out the irony of this error.

Can you see it? It’s a dangling modifier, and if the text of this post so far has set your teeth on edge but you can’t quite identify why, it may be because all three of my own sentences surrounding that quotation start with danglers. (To fix the quote, I’d recast the second part so that its subject is “I.”)

Here’s a dangler from a novel I set a few years ago (rendered from memory): Read the rest of this entry »

How interesting it’s been checking out all the Web sites that have been linking in since I got Kottked a week ago, and how sad it’s been to see the line on my WordPress traffic graph slope back down toward its normal point of zero. But today, today, my obsessive checking-out of every site listed on my referrer page paid off: I discovered Dan Rhatigan’s Ultrasparky, which is just delicious.

• Punctuation (quoty things, dashy things, dotty things)!
• Comic book lettering!
• Scans of a book that explains the old-school (and still very widely used) way to fit copy!
• Typographic tattoos!

Hours and hours of happy reading.

J’adore.

I have been shocked—shocked!—by the amount of interest in this post since it was written up on Kottke.org. Usually when I talk about what I do, people are like, “Uh huh, that sounds really, um, interesting. So, do you design covers, too?” Covers are sexy; everybody notices book covers, even if they don’t read much; no, I don’t do covers. (Well, I’ve done three. One was an unfortunate accident, and the other two are nothing special.) So, yes, all this sudden interest is very interesting to me. Plus—happy graph! Woo!

What’s been even more surprising, though, is that so far no other designers have dropped in to say, “You’re reading the castoff numbers all wrong.” “I can’t believe you used a typeface called fucking ‘Manticore’ for a fucking fantasy book!” “Trim size is actually determined based on X, Y, and Z.” “Quark is the best piece of software in the universe!” And nobody’s said, “But, the process for designing a cookbook/dictionary/art book/computer book is totally different; your half-assed workflow would never work for that.”
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If you’ve ever sat near me while I’m working in Quark XPress, you know what a charming vocabulary I have. I !@#$% hate Quark. It’s a *$&%@! buggy piece of #*@&!. I may need all the glyphs in the Unicode set to type my distaste for it.

But having glanced for a minute at Layers magazine’s new “InDesign Advantage Center,” I see a solution: I can follow their example and express my displeasure by highlighting a couple of my favorite InDesign features—which, gosh! how shocking!, Quark 6 doesn’t have. I haven’t yet played with Quark 7, but I’ve been reading reviews and think it’s safe to say these are all features it’s still missing. If I’m wrong, feel free to let me know—not that it’ll make me loathe that *&%$# plate of spaghetti code one bit less.

So. Here are the four InDesign features that I miss most in my current workflow:
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Here’s a little article that I must have read before—as I converted it from HTML to XHTML for John six or seven years ago—but had entirely forgotten. If you enjoy typographic trivia—and who doesn’t?—it may be just the lazy holiday afternoon silliness for you: Lost Things in the Garden of Type by John Tranter, 1997.

Confessions:

1. I can never keep Janson, based on type cut by Nicholas Kis, and Jenson, based on Nicolas Jenson’s roman and Ludovico degli Arrighi’s italic, straight in my head, though I know that one is plain and straightforward, while the other is foofy. I’ve never designed a book in Janson (though I’ve handled it when setting other people’s designs), but I used Adobe Jenson Pro for the subtle jubilat redesign (to replace the PostScript version of Centaur MT, which is based on the same originals). It’s also the face I used for that grief book.
2. I don’t think I’ve ever known until just now that Bell is totally unrelated to Bell Gothic and Bell Centennial. Not that I’ve ever tried to mix them, but I might have at some point. Phew!