Category: Design

What Happens When

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I don’t have a good internal sense of time. I tend not to know what day it is, can’t guess the hour with any accuracy, forget to eat lunch until 3 p.m., often let my tea steep for far too long, never leave the office at 5:00 unless I have to be somewhere else (in which case I’m typically late), stay up til 1:00 almost every night even if I’m having to hold my eyelids up with toothpicks, and tend to underestimate how long it will take me to do things. I try to counter this deficiency by setting my watch and all the clocks in my house at least five minutes fast, always setting a timer when I make tea at home, and making vigorous use of the alarms in Entourage and Google Calendar.

At my last two jobs, the problem was compounded by the fact that there were no schedules—or, at least, none that were posted or that anybody paid attention to. At the latter place in particular, the work plan was a mystery served with warm enigma glaze and an invisible cherry on top. I started to write you a timeline for a typical day, but then I thought I might get arrested and put in one of the CIA’s secret—but empty, honest!—prisons. Such opacity and evasion as I and my fellow “production artists” witnessed when trying to figure out what was really due when could only mean that our schedule was a matter of national security, and that we were being left out of the loop for our own protection.

So instead, I will focus on the positive, which is that I now work in a place where the schedules are explicit, universally distributed, and continually updated. I usually receive the necessary piles of manuscript or proofs well in advance of their due dates, and I even have time to file papers, eat lunch outside the building, study my predecessors’ work, chat by the water cooler, and once in a while turn things in before they’re due. Crazy.

So, what’s on these magnificent schedules? Here’s the typical order of operations for designing a book interior, as seen from my (heptagonal!) office:
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The Other X-Acto and Wax Technique

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The other day, Cathi told a tragic story about how

I remember right after my newspaper moved me to a brand new building and informed me I’d have to do layout with an exacto knife and waxer again because they had no Mac for me . . .

And while I’m in awe of Cathi’s skillz, I have to say, when I think “X-Acto and wax,” my associations are quite different.

<rant>
More than once—more than once, I say!—I have seen type spec’ed in the margin as something like 16pt Akzidenz Grotesk, and I look at this tiny type and think, “Sixteen points, my ass,” and then I click on the line and find that, yeah, it’s sixteen points, with the superior attribute applied to it, so it’s shrunk down. And the designer didn’t even notice that he or she had done it. Or worse, she did notice, but she left it like that saying, “Oh, let the compositor figure out what point size it is.”

And then the same designer will demonstrate to the comp how a blockquote should be formatted by creating a separate text box with a runaround and then dropping that into the middle of a regular paragraph. Apparently because the designer doesn’t know how to set indents. And god forbid she should know what a style sheet is, or a character style. I mean, really—knowing how to use your tools, that’s so . . . working-class. Designers are professionals. Continue reading “The Other X-Acto and Wax Technique” →

What are your “desert island” layout tools?

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On Tuesday I submitted the following modest list of software requests to IT:

  • Quicksilver (free)
    Application launcher and much, much more! I know it still claims to be beta, but I’ve used almost every version since it was released, with no problems.

  • TextWrangler (free)
    Text editor

  • PrintWindow Standard (free)
    Prints Finder windows

  • Badia FullMeasure XT ($79.99)
    Multifunction Quark XTension that seems to do everything the constellation of tools [for Quark 4, mostly pirated] I used to have accomplished

  • Editor’s Toolkit Plus ($69.95)
    Word macro set for scrubbing manuscripts

  • India Ink ($15)
    Photoshop plugin for mucking with halftones

  • MS Office 2004 ($?)
    Not at all urgent, but for the record, the current version has much better style sheet handling than Word X. I’m probably one of two people in the building who uses style sheets in Word, but I’m just saying, is all.

  • Firefox (free)
    Current version (1.5; I’m still on 1.0.7)

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Castoff viewed from an editor’s chair

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Here’s an illuminating take on castoff from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, empress of the awesome blog Making Light and editor of Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, which just won the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Novel:

This morning I find myself thinking about how I went to the wall when Tor’s previous head of production grossly miscalculated Spin’s castoff, and wanted to raise its price based on her overlong estimated length. That would have been corrected when Spin was typeset, and the price would have been readjusted downward; but that artificially high price would have been in play during the period when advance orders were solicited, and would have resulted in fewer orders.

So it’s probably safer to underestimate a book’s castoff than to overestimate it (though I’m sure an accurate castoff is the goal, all around).

On Thursday I started working on a composition order for a book whose castoff according to the worksheet was 320, yet whose editor asked for a page count of 256. My response on reading the transmittal was a hearty snork. For a hardcover-only design I might have been able to do something about it (something uncommonly ugly, but that’s still something). However, because this book was to be shot down to mass market, and because it was supposed to be following a previously established series design that used a rather uneconomical typeface for the body text, the closest I could get was 304. When I took the sample pages upstairs to show Mr. Lint Trap, to my surprise he said that 304—or even 320—would be fine with him, and that the editor probably hadn’t even seen the castoff before making the request for 256. Okay, that makes sense.

The thing about hitting 304 pages vs. 320, though, is that there’s a retail price jump between them—$23.95 to $24.95—so the 304-page book will cost the publisher more than a 256-pager would in typesetting, printing, paper, freight, and everything else, but it might possibly make that up in sales by avoiding the chilling effect on the consumer of a 320-pager’s $1 higher sticker price. Possibly.

Then again, the typesetter may not be able to hold it at 304 pages after all. They’ve been hitting castoff with most of my designs, but occasionally something weird comes out. We’ll see.

From the Onion

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Résumé Font Offends Employer

More typography reportage from the Onion:

And you can bet this book’s design uses drop folios: 14-Word Diet Stretched To 200 Pages (January 21, 2004).

Beautiful Bindings

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Little Folks in Feathers and Fur

If you were at all interested in the recent posts about bindings—or if you just like to look at pretty things—do visit the University of Rochester’s exhibit Beauty for Commerce: 1890–1910:

This exhibit chronicles the growth of English and American publishers’ binding from its infancy in the 1830s to its decline in the early 20th century. Highlighted are the distinct changes in design that reflected not only technical innovations in the means of book production and decoration but shifting social and cultural trends as well. Viewed as a group, publishers’ bindings represent a revolution in the history of the book. Viewed individually, each binding offers an often gilded window to the fashion of its day.

Some specimens that caught my eye: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Slaver, slaver, drool drool.

[Thanks, POLLEN!]

Seen in the wild

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(The wilds of my office, that is.)

The Affected Provincial's Companion

Today I received my preordered copy of Lord Whimsy’s The Affected Provincial’s Companion, and it is exceedingly lovely. I showed it to our production god, who had never seen a two-color stamp before and immediately thought it would be a nice look for some gift edition of something that’s in the queue. I asked him if it costs less to do an all-over case stamp than to print a jacket, and he was pretty sure that it was so. The foil is billed based on the area covered, so an all-over stamp will cost more than a spine alone, but stamping a spine costs only about $75, whereas making a single correction to a jacket—and how often is there just one correction?—costs $125. And that’s not to mention printing in four colors, embossing, and laying foil over that, all of which we often do.
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Designers vs. Illustrators (vs. Authors)

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This is not really my field, as I’m not a cover designer, but the Guardian just posted a rant by an author with the teaser (sorry—there’s a proper term for this in newspaperspeak, isn’t there?), “Now that pixels have replaced pencils the art of drawing has vanished. I’m so exasperated I’m designing my own book cover.” Supposedly, after thirteen rounds of comps and despite specifically requesting a hand-drawn illustration, the author still has only been shown covers using photographs, and she concludes that this is because designers can’t draw.

Give me a fucking break.

As someone has already posted in the comments,

  1. Designers design; they don’t necessarily draw. That elusive artist you’re looking for is called an illustrator.
  2. If the author has been asking for hand-drawn covers and the designers aren’t providing them, after thirteen rounds, it’s the fault not of the designer but of the publisher, who either isn’t
    • stating this preference in the design brief, or
    • providing a budget for an illustration, which is billed separately

The book and publisher are not mentioned by name, but it’s probably The Post-Birthday World, forthcoming from HarperCollins. We’re talking about a design department run by people who create their own fonts. I can’t believe they’d balk at buying or drawing an illustration. There’s clearly some backstory here.

Cheats, Shoots, and Leaves

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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?
Continue reading “Cheats, Shoots, and Leaves” →