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.

Be the belle-vetica of the ball

India6 Comments

Or, perhaps, the Monotype Bell[e]?

The brilliant Erin of A Dress A Day has pointed out some aggressively textual textiles for sale on eBay (and, presumably, elsewhere).

Font Fabric

She’s made a circle skirt of this already, and is considering making a dress with numbered fabric for the trim. What else can you see being made out of this? Me, I’m thinking that the nasty side chair in my office desperately needs reupholstering. And then I might make some Scrabble™-style throw pillows. What other typefaces would you like to see made into fabric? Some of the Emigre patterns, perhaps? Got any rug ideas?

[Cross-posted at clusterflock]

Now roosting with a flock near you

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You may have noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of linking to posts over at the clusterflock MMGB. Well, rather like when the owners of the candy store that I used to visit every day on my way home from junior high school offered me a job, finally (I declined, on health grounds), the friendly people at clusterflock have offered me a spot. I accepted on the condition that I not be expected to actually post anything new—I was told I could just cross-post content from here—but already today I’ve posted three entries, none of which is book-related.

So if you want more of the incredibly fascinating India Amos™ Experience, you’ll have to go over there. Which you should do anyway, because there are lots of clever, funny people in the flock, and it’s become one of my favorite blogs.

(Before I started posting there, I mean.)

Why H. and I make a good team

India2 Comments

We tend to work in pairs at my company, and I’m paired with H., whose job is basically identical to mine despite a difference in our titles (I have no idea why I’m “senior” to her). You’ve seen me refer to her as my “teammate” here. We don’t work on projects together, but we do commiserate and collude; sometimes we bounce ideas off each other; and when one of us is out of the office, the other holds the fort and deals with emergencies.

Over the years, somehow, despite being kind of an acquired taste, I’ve tended to get along with most of my colleagues, and it’s a source of great pride and delight to me that I’m still friends with, for example, people I worked with in a bookstore, making minimum wage, on the opposite coast, fifteen years ago. Most of my friends are former coworkers, in fact, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a lousy freelancer: I just get lonely. And then I go online. And that’s the end of my workday.

But although I can get along with most people in small-to-moderate doses, it’s not everyone whom I can really adore, you know? So I feel very lucky that my current teammate is the kind of person who posts signs like this when she’s taking a vacation day:

Why I Like H.

Also, she has snakes. [Heart]

Slang King

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Clusterflocker John Buaas points to 3QuarksDaily‘s pointing to a very fine review by Billy Collins of the two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Want.

This would have been the perfect Christmas gift for my father, who kept both the American Heritage dictionary and a slang dictionary on the shelf above his chair at the dinner table, and who would use any excuse to pull the books down and read some definitions to us. He wouldn’t just check the word that had raised a query in the first place, but would also treat us to any other interesting terms he leafed past along the way. (It goes without saying that I am very good at that parlor game in which you try to fool people by making up dictionary definitions that sound real. I probably learned the locution “of or pertaining to” around the same time as my ABCs.)

Collins’s article inspired me to look up the words to the Fall song “Slang King.” Who ever noticed, after all these years of listening to that album, that it contains the lines

Watch, the word had right
Biz by word processor
We’ll go together, slip down down away
Hyper, with the young designers
The young designers are always there
Always wanted to be there

Not I, for sure. No idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it seems like it ought to mean something. Any Fall-heads inclined to interpretation out there? Perhaps the dictionary would help.

You probably won't get the Nobel Peace Prize for it, but . . .

India3 Comments

you, too, can be a world-changing microfinancier. After reading about microfinancing in Ellen Lupton’s post at the “Design Your Life” blog, I just made loans to two seamstresses—one in Uganda, and one in Mexico. Says Kiva.org,

You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business – like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent – and you get updates letting you know how the business is going.

The minimum loan is $25. You pay via Paypal, but 100 percent of the loan goes to the entrepreneur; Paypal does not take its usual cut. When your loan is repaid, you can either withdraw the funds or reloan to a new person.

I think it’s a cool thing.