Book Printing: Saving a Design Job in Mid-Flight

A client of mine works at a university. She teaches creative writing, and she wants to produce a 100-page, 6” x 9”, perfect bound book. She needs only 40 copies. I have mentioned her in prior blog articles, but, up until now, what she has needed has been only help with commercial printing knowledge and project management skills.

As a writer and editor, she has an almost complete manuscript of her students’ work. Unfortunately, she is not a designer. She has no book design experience and no experience in creating even simple projects in InDesign. A few weeks ago, she was able to persuade her university to fund her print book project, both the design and the book printing.

We have a budget, and the student designer even produced a first proof of the book within the five hours allotted to her work. Unfortunately, this is not a lot of time. In addition, the semester is ending, and everyone is going their separate ways. In fact, my client is also retiring.

With this as the context of the job, I thought quickly and offered my design services at a reduced rate, that is, a discount for an educational organization. I only produce a few (sometimes only one) design projects each year, and I thought this might be a nice one, since I usually prefer to design books of poetry and fiction.

How I Approached This Job

My taking control of this design project actually made things easier. I no longer had to offer suggestions to the designer concerning margins, running headers, and cover design. I know how to create final art for the cover based on the caliper of the 70# white opaque digital text paper. I can stitch together the back cover, spine (at the proper width), and front cover such that it will fit the text block exactly with allowance for bleeds. Sometimes it’s easier to do something yourself rather than explain to someone else exactly how you’d like it to be done.

The Design of the Book

My client’s 6” x 9” book includes no graphics of any kind. She had seen a poetry book I had designed, also without graphics, and had liked its appearance. The cover of the poetry book had been just a text treatment, with the relative importance of design elements achieved through typeface changes, type size changes, and changes from all-caps treatment to capitals and lowercase letters. On this book cover, the design hinged on the beauty of the individual letterforms.

Therefore, for this client I also created a text-only cover design based on the inherent grace of the typeface. I chose Garamond Pro, an Old Style typeface, because of its cursive letterforms and diagonal slant. I also knew it would be readable as both a display font (for the cover type and titles of the essays) and also for the text of the print book.

To give my client an idea of how we might proceed, I mocked up not only the cover but also the table of contents, title page, foreword, and two articles. I wanted her to see how the margins, the extra leading between lines of type, and the running headers would look. I used a “dingbat,” a printer’s glyph in the shape of a leaf, on the cover and in the running headers for a flourish, but overall I kept everything simple. I wanted the subject of the book to be the articles, not the design, so my goal was to make the text readable, easy on the eyes, and consistent. Any distinction I needed to make between one design element and the next (for example, the foreword head and text, and the titles of the essays and the essay text), I did only by varying the type size and the typeface from bold to roman to italic. Simplicity was my goal.

That said, I did carefully kern all the larger heads on the cover, and all heads in the print book’s front matter. I wanted the letterforms to nestle into one another with no gaps. I knew that the reader’s eye would move more easily from one letter to the next in the larger heads if I paid close attention to the proximity of each letter to the next.

Addressing Production Issues Early in the Process

Since the semester had just ended when I received the initial designer’s first proof of the print book, my client, the creative writing teacher, let me know that her prior sense of urgency was over. We now had time to do this right. So she attended to copyediting and proofreading the book (to ensure the cleanest and most accurate manuscript possible) as I worked on the design. After all, copyediting at the first proof stage could seriously bog down book production.

At the same time, I was beginning to think about the production of the print book (as opposed to its design). Therefore, in addition to designing the front matter and several text pages, I printed out a set of these pages and ruled them out (in pencil, from crop mark to crop mark). I immediately could see that the running headers were a little large and a little close to the face margin of the book. I also created a composite cover (back cover, spine, and front cover, using, for now, an educated guess of the spine width)—just as a place-holder, to be amended later upon confirming the final page count. I also set up the master pages and the automatic page numbering for the book.

Since the designer had made it through a first proof of the entire book within her five-hour time allotment, I wondered whether I could use her InDesign file and build upon her work. I thought this might make things easier, but I also assumed she was using a more recent version of InDesign than I.

Since I use my old CS5 version of InDesign, I thought this would be problematic. After all, it’s usually easy to access older design files with newer design programs, but I thought it unlikely that my older version would access the student designer’s newer InDesign files.

That said, the designer was ahead of me. There is a work-around in InDesign. I knew about this and was pleasantly surprised at how it fit our particular situation. The designer saved her Creative Cloud 2017 InDesign file as an IDML file. This stands for “InDesign Markup Language.” I could open this file in InDesign CS5. I couldn’t access the new features of InDesign Creative Cloud 2017, but I could still open the designer’s file and alter the fonts, margins, and other design elements. For such a simple project, this would be ideal.

So that’s where we are now. My client likes the cover, and I have carried the look (type treatment) of the cover throughout the following front matter and interior book pages. Now I’ll sit tight and wait for the clean and corrected manuscript with which I’ll complete the next proof of my client’s print book.

What We Can Learn from This Case Study

1. 1. First of all, if you can design the print book yourself, it will save you the time needed to explain your ideas to another person, the book designer.

1. 1. For a simple project, you can depend on the beauty of the letterforms themselves as design elements. Think of the book design as a picture frame, and the content of the book as the work of art within the picture frame. If you’re producing a book, your goal is to make it easily readable. If your audience will be middle aged and beyond, consider making the type slightly larger than usual and making the leading (space between lines of type) larger than usual as well.

1. 1. Use type size and typeface (bold, italic, and roman) to indicate different levels of importance. This will show your reader what to look at first, second, and third. If you direct your reader’s eyes around the page, reading will be a more pleasurable experience, because nothing will be ambiguous or uncertain.

1. 1. Use simple elements (such as the running headers) as a horizontal line from which to (visually) hang the column of text, and leave generous space between the two. White space here, as well as between heads and text, will make the page less imposing. White space lets your reader’s eyes take a rest, as do paragraph indents.

1. 1. Design pages together and place print-outs side by side to make sure the design flows, from the cover to the first page, the table of contents, foreword, and text pages. If there is not a sense of the flow of the book, adjust the type size and spacing as needed. All of this is visually analogous to a written outline, showing clear distinctions as to how bits of information relate to one another.

1. 1. If you produce a mock-up of a handful of pages and your client doesn’t like what you’ve done, it’s much easier to make changes at this point, before you have produced an entire proof of the print book.

1. Use style sheets. In InDesign, you can manipulate a section of type to get it just right, and then highlight it and assign styles to what you have just specified. Then you can apply these styles throughout the book. If you do things this way and need to change fonts or the size of heads or text, all you need to do is adjust the style sheets, and the text of the book will change automatically.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 at 5:37 am and is filed under Book Printing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.