The Invisible Craft
The Invisible Craft
Feb 15, 2010
“Few readers are aware of the invisible craft of book designing .... The challenge isn’t to create something different or pretty or clever but to discover how best to serve the author’s words.” Richard Hendel, author and award-winning book designer
Book designers revel in all the little details that go into making a book a book. We think about paper, binding cloth, headbands, stamping foils, trim size, typography. We think about geometry. We think about how to fill space and how to leave it blank.
When I tell people that I’m a book designer they usually say, “Oh, you do the covers?” Yes. And I do the interiors, too. “Really? What do you mean?” I choose the dimensions of the page. “Oh, aren’t books basically the same size?” No, some sizes and shapes work better for different kinds of books. Novels are different from guidebooks, which are different from poetry books, which are different from cookbooks, which are different from art books . . . “What else is there to do?” I think about what typefaces will be used for the texts. “But that doesn’t seem too important, aren’t all type styles pretty much the same?” Book designers know that every typeface communicates differently, some typefaces are easier to read than others, some typefaces look better at larger sizes, some typefaces are currently “in” and others are “out.” “So do you work with photographs?” Book designers work with lots of different elements depending on the needs of the manuscript. We know how to translate written expression into visual communication.
And when we do our jobs really, really well, our work usually isn’t noticed by readers, except that maybe they have the sense that “this book just feels right.”
© Sue Niewiarowski