Month: November 2006

Deeee-luxe.

IndiaLeave a comment

Here is a short-run signed gift edition whose case stamp (right foreground) I got to design (I did the interior, too; not worth showing).

OSC Gift Edition

The vermilion endsheets, as you can see, are the best part. The headbands have yellow and white stripes. The red pigment on the title is deeper and more lacquerlike than it looks in the photo.

It’s not at all inspired, I’m afraid, but the author said he’s happy with it, and that’s what counts, right? The jacket design for the non-gift edition (left) is by Jamie Stafford-Hill (the stamped one has a clear acetate dust jacket); I don’t remember who did the illustration. I originally tried to make a simplified version of the whole illustration into a two-color stamp, but it just didn’t look good. So after too many days of fiddling around in Photoshop, I finally went with just the gold dome.

The result won’t even make it into the Guild of Book Workers Best of Late November awards. Sigh.

WWLWHD? What would you have done?

Checking Proofs

India4 Comments

How much of a designer’s work consists of actual designing as opposed to meeting, doing paperwork, fiddling with FTP software, watching YouTube, organizing bloated font libraries, etc.? It depends on what kind of design you do, and what kind of place you work, but for most designers I’d guess that designing proper accounts for less than half of their time at work. Maybe less than a third. Of course, designers also tend to be constantly thinking about design, so you could say they’re designing around the clock; but while their heads are doing one thing, their hands are quite likely having to do another much less interesting thing.

For me, the bulk of my job consists of checking proofs. Not proofreading, which we hire someone to do, nor comparing old and new passes of a manuscript to make sure editorial corrections have been made correctly, which the production editor does, but checking for layout errors. There’s plenty of instruction on regular proofreading to be had (I recommend Mark My Words, if you want to go the book route; I’ve never taken a class in it myself, but I know many who’ve done so at NYU and the New School in NYC), but nobody’s ever told me how to check page layouts.

Well, not nobody. On my first or second day at this job, my teammate gave me a stack of manuscript and said to look for “weirdness.” That’s a bit vague for me, so in the past six months, I’ve come up with my own system:

Proofing notes

Hello, my name is India, and I am a geek. Continue reading “Checking Proofs” →

How did I get here?!?

India17 Comments

A long time ago, in a comment thread at his own blog, Derek asked how I landed in book design, despite my not having any formal training in design.

My initial response was, “Certainly! My pleasure! Pull up a chair.

“I was born in a one-room log cabin . . .”

But then I started actually trying to explain it, and the explanation got way too long—which comes as a huge surprise, I know, since I’m usually so concise, using just a few well-chosen simple declarative sentences.

So I’ve sat on the draft for three months now, and it’s still ridiculously long and overly detailed, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. Because (1) that’s the way my brain works; blame my >32 AQ, and (2) real lives are messy. When they write the third-grade-reading-level biography of me, it’ll probably read something like,

India was born in New York City. Her mother was an extremely famous artist. Her father worked in advertising and marketing. She became a very famous book designer, earning quadrillions of dollars. Then she won the first Nobel Peace Prize for Book Design. When she died, she had ninety-two cats. The end.

But in reality, there’s no straight line; it wiggles and blurs all over the place. I was one of those kids—or is it all of them?—who hated being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only knew that I didn’t want to be an artist and didn’t want to work in advertising. But besides that, I had no clue.

So, let’s start a little later.
Continue reading “How did I get here?!?” →

Memo to Editorial

India3 Comments

Just sent, re a book that I redesigned twice, and whose trim size changed midstream:

Dear [X]/[Y],

I’m not sure whose query this is on the design approval memo, but in answer to the question of whether the castoff (352) is “shorter now because of [larger]-size,” uh, yesish.

I managed to make the [smaller]-size design come in at 384 (castoff was a tight 400) by using Stone Print, a condensed typeface intended for use in magazines with narrow columns. The final design uses Plantin, an average-width typeface more suited to extended reading in book format. So we lost some pages to the trim change and gained a few for readability.

The result is that overall the book is shorter, but not so much shorter as it would be had I merely widened the original design to fit the new margins. Had I widened the original design, it would have become repellent—it’s difficult to continuously read text that is more than about 70 characters wide. Your eyes can’t easily jump from the end of one line to the beginning of the next; your brain can’t hold the sentences together as well. Besides that, it looks cheap and unprofessional. And it makes babies cry.

Bad typography is, in fact, the reason why most babies cry. Now you know.

I hope that answers your question.

Yr hmbl srvnt,
—
India Amos

I only didn’t cite sources because, well, my dog ate them.

And then a cockroach ate my dog.