dot-font: The Last Word on Book Design
dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
Truly mastering the nuances and practice of book design takes at least one well-stocked library and one long lifetime, but everybody has to start somewhere. With this last installment of my three-part introduction to book design, I close what I hope will be a useful starting point for the aspiring book designer and curious browser alike.
Last week we focused on designing the body text—the text that makes up the bulk of the book’s content. This third installment primarily looks at display type and front and back matter.
Display Type
At a glance, it’s easy to say what “display type” is: anything that’s not running text. But there are lots of different ways to use display type in a book, from the subtle to the splashy. As with any aspect of book design, the display type should not be just a place for the designer to show off; it should serve a purpose for the reader.
The most straightforward kind of display type is heads, which are attached to the text and serve to guide the reader. With technical books in particular, some designers revel in a downpour of head styles and sizes and variations, which are intended to reflect the complex organization of the information the book presents. But how many levels of head and subhead does any reader truly notice and distinguish? From my own experience, I’d say the maximum is three and that limiting the heads to two levels, one big and one small, is better still.
When I’m talking about heads, I mean heads within the text—not chapter titles or subtitles, which are conceptually separate. (I know that some publishers like to number their heads starting with the chapter title as level one, but this has never made any intuitive sense to me, and I discourage it.)
To distinguish different levels of heads, it’s best to use two kinds of contrast at the same time: not just a change of type size, for instance, but a change of type size and a different position on the page, or a change of size and a change of weight or style.
Don’t rely too heavily on differences in type style, such as changing from roman to italic, or from a serif to a sans-serif typeface: It’s amazing how few readers will notice such changes. A favorite device is to use Helvetica for a run-in sidehead (that is, a subhead that’s run into the text, rather than sitting above it or beside it) in a paragraph of Times Roman text. Despite the obvious differences in the letter structure of the two typefaces when you look at them closely, they don’t stand out from each other enough in a page of text; the change just creates an impression of clutter and disorder. If you add a change of weight to the change of style, however, then you’ve created enough contrast to make the difference obvious: Helvetica Bold (better yet, Extrabold) subheads in regular-weight Times Roman text stand out quite clearly.
Text Is More Important than Display
Assuming you’ve designed the text block—the rectangle formed by the lines of text on the page—for easy reading, the display type shouldn’t intrude on this text. Once you’ve got a comfortable line length for the text, leave it alone. There’s a very common practice, especially in magazines, of letting a picture or a bit of display type (such as a pull-quote) push into the text block from one side or another, forcing the text to wrap around the intruding shape. This can be done effectively, but most often it just means that for the depth of the intrusion, the text has to fit itself into a column that’s too narrow, with the kinds of awkward spacing you might expect. It’s far better to design a multicolumn layout, and to let the artwork or other display items occupy the width of a whole column (or several columns), rather than to vary the width of the text to accommodate the pretty pictures.
Be Consistent
Whether your display type is a series of carefully modulated heads or a wild array of call-outs, banners, and thought balloons, you’ll help your reader by treating the same kind of elements the same throughout the book. Consistent treatment of related elements is essential to making the structure of the book clear to the reader.
Simplify the structure as much as possible, and use contrast to make it very clear what’s what. That, along with good text typography, sums up the most important principles of designing a complex book.
No Bells, No Whistles
All too often, someone designing a book that’s not complex—one that consists of nothing more than chapters of prose—tries to jazz it up by giving too much attention to elements that aren’t important. The chapter opening is a good place to be a little flamboyant, but it’s only there for the convenience of the reader; a flashy chapter-opening page that isn’t easy to read, or that interrupts the reader and grabs the reader’s attention, is a mistake.
Among the most annoying examples of misplaced creativity are the overly elaborate page number and running head or running foot. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them all “running heads” from now on, no matter where on the page they may fall.) The only purpose of the page number is to help the reader navigate; the same is generally true of a running head, though these days there may be another use for the latter: to provide an indication of the source of photocopied pages. Fancy treatments of either page number or running head are self-defeating. They just get in the way. The information should be small and unobtrusive; it simply has to be there when the reader needs it.
References in the Text
A variation of this has to do with notes and cross-references. How many times have you ended up frustrated with end-notes (notes grouped in the back of the book, as opposed to footnotes on the same page), because it was hard to flip back and forth between the notes and the text without losing your place? The information in the notes section that identifies what chapter the notes belong with should be the same information you see on the page when you’re reading the chapter. It doesn’t do much good to see a section of notes in the back of the book labeled “Chapter Three” if the running heads in Chapter Three never mention the chapter number, identifying it only by chapter title.
If the book you’re designing has cross-references, they should be obvious. In reference books, a traditional way of indicating names and terms that have their own entries is to put them in small caps, but this only works if the text face has a set of true small caps and if the typesetter takes the trouble to letterspace them slightly looser than the surrounding text. Using the “small caps” command in a word-processing program to create fake small caps, by just shrinking the full caps, is a ghastly practice that produces unreadable little blobs of tangled, too-light type.
On the other hand if you use italics to indicate either cross-references or something like words that have an entry in a glossary, make sure the italic of the typeface you’re using is easily readable. In general, Renaissance-style italics, such as Bembo italic or Minion italic, are easier to read than the rounded 19th-century Modern-style italics like Didot italic or Scotch italic, though this is a rule of thumb with plenty of exceptions.
Front & Back, Inside & Out
In general, the front and back matter of a book (things like the table of contents, the preface, the index, and any appendices) should be in the style of the body of the book, but perhaps set in a smaller type size. The heart of any book is the main text, and everything else should grow out of it.
This applies even to the cover or dust jacket, although modern commercial publishing practice makes this extremely hard. The cover should be an outgrowth of the interior, ideally; at the very least, it should harmonize with the design of the book itself. But in most large publishing companies, not only are the cover or jacket and the interior designed by two different people, but those people may not even be part of the same department or division.
Book covers and jackets are considered part of the marketing of the book, which is logical enough. But in a day when most books are paperbacks, where the cover is inextricably part of the book itself (unlike a removable jacket), this promotional material is going to be part of the book on the bookshelf, not just in the store. It had better be something attractive, something a reader can bear to have on the shelf.
Incidentally, in a hardcover book with a jacket, the actual cover of the cloth binding should reflect the interior design, not the jacket design. It’s rarely effective to use the same type treatment embossed into the cloth that you’ve used printed on the flimsy jacket. Similarly, there’s no reason on earth for the book’s title page to look like the cover.
Editors & Designers
The last detail to cover is a philosophical one: which decisions are typographic and which are editorial. As someone who works as both an editor and a graphic designer, I find no conflict between these two ways of looking at text, but most people specialize in one or the other. Editors need to know what typographic tools they have at their disposal in order to make sense of complex information in a book, but they shouldn’t be deciding how the designer will distinguish one kind of information from another. It’s all too common, for instance, for an editor to insist that certain elements of the text be in small caps, when the designer may find that the typeface doesn’t have true small caps or that there’s another, better way to handle the distinction needed.
Editors and designers need to talk to each other, all the way through the process of developing a book.
Resources
For all my present wordiness, this is just a quick once-over of some of the more obvious parts of designing a book. The best source is simply the books you see every day: The best are the good examples, and the worst should be taken as warnings of what not to do.
Of course, there are also some very useful books on book design. Some of them were written before the desktop-publishing revolution, so they don’t reflect current production techniques, but the best will give you a solid grounding in the principles involved—principles that don’t change just because the type is now set digitally. Here are a few of the best books on the subject:
Jost Hochuli & Robin Kinross, “Designing Books: Practice and Theory.” (London: Hyphen Press, 1997; U.S. distributor, Chronicle Books.)
Jan Tschichold, “The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design.” (Vancouver, B.C., & Point Roberts, Wash.: Hartley & Marks, 1991.)
Adrian Wilson, “The Design of Books.” (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1967. Reprinted with new introduction: San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.)
Hugh Williamson, “Methods of Book Design: The Practice of an Industrial Craft.” (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1983. Third edition.)
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