Author: India

Choosing text type

India24 Comments

There’s a nice little article that’s been doing the linky rounds called 15 tips to choose a good text type, by Juan Pablo De Gregorio, a Chilean graphic designer and a typographer. (I saw it most recently at Coudal Partners, who got it from Andy Rutledge.)

I was already thinking about this, as the famed David Moldawer asked me about it a couple of months ago, but I’m not sure I can unravel the selection process very articulately. Most of Señor De Gregorio’s advice has to do with legibility, and that is, indeed, a very big concern. But then how do you choose among the hundreds of typefaces that are quite legible, inoffensive, and suitable for text? Continue reading “Choosing text type” →

The Visual Display of Temporal Information

India7 Comments

I’m not very good with calendars. I used to get an engagement calendar each year but would write what had happened rather than what was supposed to happen. Now I use MacJournal for that. Then for a while the Palm Pilot calendar worked for me, beeping me to my appointments as long as I remembered to keep live batteries in it. I fell out of the habit of carrying a PDA, though, and at present I’m kept in line by Entourage at work, since I have to use it for e-mail anyway, and Google Calendar for personal dates. The only paper calendar in my life comes free from my college each year. I dutifully post it on the fridge and try to remember to turn the page every four weeks, give or take. I never write on it, as doing so would be a sure way of making me miss the event in question.

So the calendar whose corner is shown below, which the friendly and obviously brilliant W. Bradford Paley was giving away yesterday at a soiree I was lucky enough to attend, will be no more useless to me than most. I hope to find a wall for it in my new office.

W. Bradford Paley's calendar

I may even write something on it occasionally (very small, very neatly) and upload a photo of it, thus defaced, to the calendar’s discussion forum. Continue reading “The Visual Display of Temporal Information” →

Now, that's the kind of author I like

India8 Comments

An editor just delivered to me a Starbucks gift card from the author of a book I haven’t even started working on yet. The author was late in returning the copyedited manuscript (or something—according to the schedule I have, nothing’s due until January) and actually felt guilty, knowing that combined with the holidays, this might send a cascade of hardship through the production department.

Awww.

Does Starbucks have sandwiches? (Being a tea drinker, I never go in there.) I could really use a sandwich right now.

"India, Pixels" doesn't have much of a ring to it, sadly.

India6 Comments

Okay, so, you know how I’m always talking about pretty things you can make out of dead trees? Well, how would you feel if I kind of maybe mixed that up with some stuff about the pretty things you can make out of living, blinking pixels? Because as of January 15, 2007, I’ll no longer be designing book interiors full-time. Nope, instead, I’m switching gears—again!—to go manage this Web site. I’ll also be doing a bit of print-related stuff there, and, because I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to say “No,” I’ll probably continue doing freelance work on print publications; but overall you should see a shift on this blog from print-related verbose rambling to Web-related verbose rambling. It’ll still be book-related, because I’ll be working at a literary organization with book right there in the name, but the nerdy parts may sound different.

(For those of you who’re amused by how-did-I-get-here stories, this latest transition was brought to you by two friends and former coworkers from the Academy of American Poets, who now work at Nextbook. There was some stuff that needed doing, and they thought I’d be a good person to come do it. There was lunch; there was tea; there was no interview-for-which- I-had-to-wear-grown-up-shoes. I feel guilty about leaving my current sweet gig so soon—I like it just fine and had intended to stay there at least five years—you know, until I was fully vested in the 401K—but the new gig is even sweeter, and I have friends and admired colleagues there already, and I dearly hope that I will like it even finer.)

So, if you have any outstanding questions about what it’s like to design book guts in house for a mainstream publisher, now’s your chance! Ask me before I forget everything!

And if you have any observations about Nextbook.org (which is about to be relaunched, with a redesign that I’ve had nothing to do with—exciting!), feel free to shoot them my way, either in comments or by e-mail. It’s been more than five years since I was responsible for a big-ass Web project, and it really would help me get up to speed with this new job to hear what some of you think of the existing site. I have my own vague opinions about it, and I’ve yet to thoroughly examine the redesign that’s still under wraps. But I don’t have any sense (much less hard data) yet of who visits the site, how they use it, and what they think of it. I’d love to hear your impressions, whether you’ve ever visited it before reading this post or not.

In other news, I’m on vacation. Hello, London! Any book nerds here? And Tuesday: Paris!

Deeee-luxe.

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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?!?” →