Zemni Design

Design Explorations by Linda Mayoux

Book Design Process

Author: lindamayoux

  • Book Design Process

    Working to a Brief

    Working to a ‘Brief’

    A book designer generally works to a ‘brief’ – a specific set of requirements for a particular project. The brief may be set by an external agency, or it may be self-initiated. The scope of the brief may vary in terms of how much creative input the designer can exercise. In some assignments the designer is provided with text and images, along with clear guidelines as to how these are to be set out. In other cases they may be provided with a brief outline of content and title and asked to ‘come up with ideas’ – to devise concepts for cover images, for example.

    The role of the designer

    The designer’s role is collaborative and communicative. The designer is responsible for the visual elements on the page, the structure, arrangement and layout of typography and images. The role can be highly creative, particularly when the role crosses over into art direction; where this is the case, the designer’s ideas play a major part in shaping the visual book form.

    There is a clear distinction between:

    • editorial roles: an editor deals with all the text
    • designing roles: a designer deals with the images and layout. A designer deals with the arrangement of the text and images but never edits the text. Although errors in the text may be apparent, a designer never makes corrections without first alerting the client and the editor.

    Depending on the publishing and production model used, the designer may
    be largely responsible for aspects of the proposal, development and realisation of the book form and may oversee the control of various elements as the book makes its way through the production process, ultimately checking printer’s proofs and ‘signing off’ a project when it is ready to go to print.

    Creative Design Process

    Book design is related to graphic design and a similar working process underpins much of the creative thinking and evolution of any particular design job. The creative design process includes the following stages:

    • Ideas generation
    • Research
    • Development
    • Visuals
    • Presentation

    But it is not a prescriptive process – key phases (eg research and development) often overlap and link quite organically. Design work generally follows a cyclical rather than a linear process, repeating the phases many times from a micro to macro scale and back to refine and ultimately conclude the design.

    Generating ideas
    The design process begins with the generating of visual ideas. In this early formative stage, be as wide-ranging and imaginative as possible in your ideas. ALL ideas are valid at this point, so don’t censor; this is not the stage to decide what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea – at this point they are all just ‘ideas’ with equal
    merit. Record your thought processes and ideas using (in no particular order):

    • Brainstorming/spidergrams/mindmaps: ideas expressed in short sentences, ideas can be triggered by previous, or be new, bizarre ideas are encouraged – good triggers, freethinking – the more the merrier, all ideas stated uninterrupted and accepted – none are rubbished. Concept maps like spidegrams can be used to explore concepts and the connections between them, these can be coloured, rearranged and reworked and redrawn to progressively clarify and then link, or deconstruct again to get new thoughts and angles. It may be useful to mix working with computer programmes like Mindjet, Inspiration or iThoughtsHD and work on paper.
    • thumbnail sketches: quick pen or pencil line drawings to give a reminder of a fleeting idea, and can give an indication of composition and art direction. For example, how does the subject sit in the frame? How is the subject lit? What particular attributes does that subject have? Often experimentation in digital form using Illustrator or Photoshop can usefully complement the work on paper to quickly explore different compositions and colour combinations from scanned sketches.
    • annotation in wiring or ‘sketchnoting’ on the paper thumbnails. Again it is often useful to scan in combinations and get printouts that can be scribbled over without overshadowing the original ideas.

    It is important to let one idea flow fluidly, intuitively and organically into another to make unexpected links and associations.

     

    Review and selection
    Review your thumbnail sketches and analyse each one through a process of critical evaluation. Which ideas are you drawn to? Which ideas have ‘legs’ – possible interesting outcomes which are worth pursuing? Often the ideas which are strongest are those which have depth, or many layers of association. Perhaps you are intuitively drawn to a particular idea. Select several ideas/thumbnails which you would like to develop further.

    Research and development

    The form your research will take depends on the individual elements of your idea. It may be that you need to make some objective drawings, for example, to understand your subject better, and to consider aspects of composition. Other research activities include arranging a photoshoot to further explore your visual ideas, or going on-line to source material that informs your ideas. You can use both primary and secondary sources of research in this way. Research feeds into the development of your visual work, informing and advancing your ideas. Document this phase of the work accordingly.

    Visuals
    This is the culmination of all your preliminary work. Work up some more developed visual sketches. These can be hand-drawn illustrations, photographs, and/or include typography. The presentation can be a little rough around the edges but should show the main elements of the design.

    Presentation
    Present your ideas as finished visual images. Create digital files of your images, making sure these are a reasonable resolution – 180dpi is a good minimum, 300dpi is optimum.

  • Fanzines

     

    It was first used by US sci fi enthusiast Louis Russell Chauvenet in 1940 and by 1949 was in common use.

    ‘Fanzine’ was abbreviated to ‘zine’ in 1970s.  The rise of fanzines  was part of the punk subcultural response to mainstream society – in this case, mainstream print.

    • Distribution: Zines were hand-made publications produced in small quantities on an irregular basis.They were usually small enough to easily fit in the hand although sometimes they were oversized broadsheets. They were distributed by hand and word of mouth or via independent music or book stores or through zine fairs and symposia.
    • Readership were super-niche interest groups and cultural underground.
    • Production: Created by a single producer as both author and designer. Unencumbered by censorship or corporate strategy. Producers were often readers and/or fans sharing same interests.
    • Subject matter As ‘Genuine voices outside of all mass manipulation’  they  explored a wide variety of themes political, humorous, poetic, underground music not necessarily represented in more conventional print.  They were also a forum for personal experimentation ‘perzines’ as unique auto/biographical snapshots.’practice of self-making though zine-making is particularly momentary,’Sometimes a testing ground to ideas which then move to the mainstream. Eg Giant Robot and Bust Magazine.
    • Style Lively Do it yourself style uninhibited by design conventions. Often chaotically lively layout.
    • Cheap and designed to be ephemeral They were often printed using photocopiers, stencil and other ‘hands-on’ processes. Sometimes they were more 3-dimensional and incorporated recycled objects or materials.
    • Materials different coloured papers, crayons, felt-tip markers, Ribbons, stickers. Collages photos hand-drawn illustrations. often made with very basic tools: scissors, glue.
    • Typography handwritten or typewritten or using rub-down lettering.

    Feminist zines use provocative language, sexual imagery, a mix of styles aiming to shock. Guerilla Girls, a feminist group fighting sexism in arts practice produced many fanzines. Formed in New York in 1985, the group maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks and using the names of dead female artists as pseudonyms, e.g. Frida Kahlo and Hannah HÖch. They put pressure on organisations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by uncovering statistics that reveal the extent of patriarchy in the art world past and present. The original group disbanded in 2001 but several Guerrilla Girl spin-offs still exist. Recent campaigns include ‘Unchain female directors’ targeted at the male-dominated world of the Hollywood film studio.

    In the 1990s faux fanzines started to be produced by multinational companies. Dirt by Warner Brothers, Full Voice by Body Shop etc.

    There are now also online and digital forms.

  • History of book design

    Origins

    The earliest forms of books were scrolls produced by Egyptian scribes over 4,000 years ago.

    • Images and vertical text were hand-drawn onto palm leaves, then later onto papyrus scrolls.
    • Papyrus was made from the pith of the papyrus plant and was rather like thick paper. It was used throughout the ancient world until the development of parchment.
    • Parchment was a superior material to papyrus. Made from dried, treated animal skin, parchment could be written on on both sides and was more pliable than papyrus, which meant that it could be folded.
    • Folding a large parchment sheet in half created two folios – a word we still use today to number pages. Folding the sheet in half again created a quarto (4to) and folding that in half again made eight pages – an octavo (8vo).The development of parchment created a break with the scroll form. Folded pages were now piled together and bound along one edge to create a codex, a manuscript text bound in book form.

    Paper, invented in China, spread through the Islamic world to reach medieval Europe in the 13th century, where the first paper mills were built. See ‘Paper’ full post.

    Skilled hand-lettering was laborious and time-consuming and a world apart from the printing methods of today.

    Illuminated manuscripts

    The term manuscript comes from the Latin for hand ‘manus’ and writing ‘scriptum’. Illuminated manuscripts, often containing religious, historical or instructive texts, were coloured with rich and delicate pigments, often with the addition of gold leaf. These were objects of rare beauty. Bound manuscripts were produced in Britain from around 600 to 1600.

    The advent of movable type

    Movable type brought about a massive revolution in the way books were designed, produced and perceived.
    Sandcast type was used in Korean book design from around 1230 and woodblocks were used to print paper money and cards in China from the seventh century.
    Johann Gutenberg produced the first western book printed using movable type in 1454. This was the Gutenberg Bible or ‘42-line Bible’. This led the way for a revolution in the way books were designed and printed. Having set the metal type, the printer could then produce multiple copies. The printing process made books much more widely available to a larger audience. By 1500, printing presses in Western Europe had produced more than twenty million books.

    Arts and Crafts movement

    Private English presses such as Doves Press and the Ashendene Press typified the publishing industry in the early part of the twentieth century. The influential designer, craftsman, artist and writer William Morris (1834–96) founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891; this was dedicated to publishing limited edition, illuminated style books. The designer Eric Gill (1882–1940), a
    fellow member of the Arts and Crafts movement, designed books for both English and German publishers. Gill also produced The Canterbury Tales (1931) for Golden Cockerel Press, which was one of the last English presses still going strong after 1925.

    While English and German publishers were known for the quality and craftsmanship of their typography and overall book design, French publishers such as Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) focused on the illustrative elements of book design. ‘Livres de luxe’ were expensive editions of books illustrated by contemporary artists such as Bonnard, Chagall, Degas, Dufy and Picasso.

    20th Century

    Artistic movements had a real and direct impact on book design in the twentieth century, with the Fauvists, Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivists and Bauhaus feeding into a febrile pot of manifestos, ideas and approaches to typography and book design.
    Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in England in 1935, with the aim of producing affordable books for the masses. The books were characterised by strong typographic and design principles. In the early 1950s designers Jan Tschichold and Ruari McLean created modernist iconographic cover designs for Penguin books.
    Advancing print technologies, letterpress, offset lithography and the development of graphic design, gave rise to a plethora of colour printed material, making book design one of the earliest and best examples of mass communication.

    Fanzines

    The digital era

    The 1980s and 1990s saw the burgeoning of desktop publishing (DTP). Book design was no longer bound by the constraints of metal typesetting. Apple Macintosh computer systems enabled book designers to integrate text and images into multiple pages digitally, on-screen. This move away from traditional design and printing processes created massive upheaval in the publishing industry, and many long-established forms of working were usurped by the new digital technology.

    In new wave of graphic and book designers emerged who embraced the new technology and, like the Futurists and Dadaists before them, questioned and experimented with some of the conventional approaches to typography and book design. Designers such as Neville Brody (Fuse magazine) and David Carson (The End of Print) captured the experimental mood of the time.

    The revolution in printing processes continues apace today, but the book in its traditional form remains a pervasive presence alongside its digital counterparts – the e-book is a good example. The internet has revolutionised the way book designers work, making distance book design work a  commonplace reality. In addition, a huge and often overwhelming range of fonts, images and resources is immediately available online. The word ‘font’ has entered everyday vocabulary – even for schoolchildren – and choosing the best font for the job is now something that many of us do almost without thinking. DTP means that everyone can potentially access what they need to design a book. From a purist perspective, the inherent danger with this creative freedom is that poor design choices result from uninformed ‘quick-fix’ solutions. The positive aspect is that the designer has never before had so many options to choose from, in terms of typography, design and production values.

  • Book Covers

    Book Covers

    Book cover design can be:

    • ‘conceptual’ or ideas-based where there is an underlying message within the design.
    •  ‘expressive’ employing representational or abstract imagery in a variety of media to communicate the main message/s of the book.
    • be designed mainly around photographic, illustrative and typographic elements.

    The cover, or dustjacket, serves two purposes:

    To spell out the contents:

    • So that you are in no doubt as to what you are buying? This has a tendency to mean that many titles within a particular genre look the same.
    • Sex sells: Twentieth-century American pulp fiction covers often used an archetypal hour-glass figure of a woman (with smoking gun) to entice its buying audience. These covers were printed post-war, using inks that produced vibrant colours.

    Branding for the publisher:  to create a positive association with a particular publisher and to build a relationship with the book-buying audience.

    • to protect the book: 
    • to express something of its contents and nature – to sell the product in a highly competitive market.

    History

    Early books were handbound with strong heavy covers. In the Victorian era cheap paper-covered reprints had been widely available. In 19C as books became cheaper to produce, and with developments in printing processes, using colour lithography, the book cover became more than a functional protective device: it was a space to advertise and communicate information about the book’s content. Poster designers and graphic designers of the era began to use it as such.

    Cover of the Yellow Book by Aubrey Beardsley

    Aubrey Beardsley’s The Yellow Book (1894–97) is a good example of design to promote a book.

    The Arts and Crafts movement of the early twentieth century revitalised interest in book cover design and this began to influence and infiltrate mainstream publishing.

    El Lissitsky, book cover for the Isms of Art: 1914-1924.
    El Lissitsky, book cover for the Isms of Art: 1914-1924.

    In the 1920s radically modern cover designs were produced in the Soviet Union by Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky.

    Victor Gollantcz book covers

    In the late 1920s the publisher Victor Gollancz carried out research on busy railway platforms, noticing which colours caught the eye on the book covers that appeared on newstands, as seen through the crowds. Based on his research he designed his publishing ‘house style,’ using what was at the time a very bright yellow, with inventive black and magenta typography. After black and white, yellow and black is the most easily readable colour combination.

    Penguin Books:‘What is cheap need not be nasty’ Britain’s approach to cover design was somewhat more restrained. When Allen Lane approached the established publisher Bodley Head in the late 1920s, with ideas for a new, affordable approach to book design, his ideas were turned down. Lane went on to form Penguin Books and to champion a new publishing model in economically depressed Britain. Penguin’s iconic orange, black and white covers from the same era are a striking example of simple and effective design: clear, uncluttered and an early example of successful branding. In the mid 1930s Penguin formed part of the ‘paperback revolution’, producing affordable books with quality design, and their publishing identity sought to be associated with this approach. Penguin’s designs used classic yet modern typography within a clearly defined structure. The template was set up by Jan Tschichold in 1947 and broadly applied to all Penguin’s books. Penguin’s approach has become a defining mainstay of British book design and an excellent example of successful book branding.

    Producing a cover

    The cover has been likened to a mini-poster, and in many respects serves the same purpose, in that the design needs to grab the attention of its audience within a few seconds. Sometimes it is a new book. Publishers periodically re-vamp cover designs, to tie in with promotional features, anniversaries of the book’s original publication, film versions and other marketing opportunities.

    Elements

    • Concept
    • Typography: the title, the author’s name, subtitle and quotes.
    • Colour
    • Imagery : As a general rule of thumb, to have maximum effect the cover usually bears a single image. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule; many manuals, non-fiction and ‘how to’ books use multiple images. Dorling Kindersley publications, for example, are recognisable for their crisp colour cutout photographs on a white background.

    In publishing workflow, the cover is treated as a separate entity to the main book contents. The evolution of a cover design, from inception to completion, can take as long as the design of the main book itself. For example, a reasonable timespan for the design and publication of a 256-page illustrated book could be nine months. The cover or jacket design for the same book can take just as long, even though the image and textual material is significantly less. This is due in part to the many requirements that a cover has to fulfil, including commercial and marketing aspects.

    The marketing and sales departments within publishing organisations know the importance of the cover with regard to revenue, so often the design of a cover involves considering a great many aspects, to meet multiple needs. This can sometimes confuse the brief. Cover design meetings can turn into ‘design by committee’, with all parties – editor, designer, sales and marketing – having their input, often with different approaches to the project. This inevitably
    slows the process and can lead to conflicting messages for the designer.

    Whilst it’s important to take on board everyone’s input, and adjust designs accordingly if required, ‘design by committee’ can be confusing. Essentially, the brief for a cover design needs to be clear at the outset, so that the designer has clear parameters to work within. As a designer it can occasionally be your role to argue the merits for what you consider to be a strong cover design, one that has quality and integrity within the various elements of the design.

    See design workflow

  • The Yellow Book

    edited from Wikipedia The Yellow Book

    Cover of the Yellow Book by Aubrey Beardsley

    The Yellow Book was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897. It was a leading journal of the British 1890s and lent its name to the “Yellow Nineties” and the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of paintings.

    It was published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland.

    Aubrey Beardsley was its first art editor, and he has been credited with the idea of the yellow cover, with its association with illicit French fiction of the period. He obtained works by such artists as Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, and Philip Wilson Steer. The literary content was no less distinguished; authors who contributed were: Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, “Baron Corvo“, Ernest Dowson, George Gissing, Sir Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Richard Le Gallienne, Charlotte Mew, Arthur Symons, H. G. Wells, William Butler Yeats and Frank Swettenham. A notable feature was the inclusion of work by women writers and illustrators, among them Ella D’Arcy and Ethel Colburn Mayne (both also served as Harland’s subeditors), George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Ada Leverson, Netta and Nellie Syrett, and Ethel Reed.

    It was to some degree associated with Aestheticism and Decadence, but also style. The first issue of The Yellow Book‘s prospectus introduces it “as a book in form, a book in substance; a book beautiful to see and convenient to handle; a book with style, a book with finish; a book that every book-lover will love at first sight; a book that will make book-lovers of many who are now indifferent to books”. The periodical was priced at 5 shillings.

    Cover: The Yellow Book‘s brilliant colour immediately associated the periodical with illicit French novels – an anticipation, many thought, of the scurrilous content inside.  It was issued clothbound.

    Art separate from text:  Harland and Beardsley rejected the idea that the function of artwork was merely explanatory: “There is to be no connection whatever [between the text and illustrations]. [They] will be quite separate”. The equilibrium which The Yellow Book poses between art and text is emphasized by the separate title pages before each individual work whether literary or pictorial.

    Page layout: The Yellow Book‘s mise-en-page differed dramatically from current Victorian periodicals: “… its asymmetrically placed titles, lavish margins, abundance of white space, and relatively square page declare The Yellow Book’s specific and substantial debt to Whistler”. The use of white space is positive rather than negative, simultaneously drawing the reader’s eye to the blank page as an aesthetic and essentially created object. 

    Typography: The decision to print The Yellow Book in Caslon-old face further signified the ties which The Yellow Book held to the Revivalists. Caslon-old face, “an eighteenth-century revival of a seventeenth-century typographical style” became “the type-face of deliberate and principled reaction or anachronism”. A type-face generally reserved for devotional and ecclesiastical work, its use in the pages of The Yellow Book at once identified it with the “Religion of Beauty”.

    Use of catch-words on every page enhanced The Yellow Book‘s link to the obsolescent. Both antiquated and obtrusive, the catch-phrase interrupts the cognitive process of reading: “making-transparent … the physical sign which constitutes the act of reading; and in doing this, catch-words participate in the ‘pictorialization’ of typography”. By interrupting readers through the very use of irrelevant text, catch-words lend the printed word a solidity of form which is otherwise ignored.

  • Bubblewrap

  • Beetroot tales

    Stalk stories

    Beetroot bunnies

    Other images to develop

  • Treacle

    Letter T

  • Enamel tiles

    From Assignment 5 Letter E

    I use enamel tiles a lot for mixing inks and paint. These often leave very interesting images that can be photographed and scanned and then composited in Photoshop. Many different types of line and texture can be produced using different media, and different types of scratching or smudging implements.

    Images can also be printed on paper, or used as backdrawn monoprints.

    Letter E

  • Emulsion

    From Assignment 5: Letter E

    Emulsion on emery paper

    Emulsion paint on emery paper gives a flat image that retains brush strokes, and can be scratched into.

    Emulsion on enamel tiles

    Evil echidna and eocene emissaries - scratching into emulsion paint on enamel tiles
    Evil echidna and eocene emissaries – scratching into emulsion paint on enamel tiles

     

    Letter E