Books
Wozencroft, Jon: The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988.
From a design point of view, books are primarily about establishing a clear typographic system. Book design is of course a very different proposition to working on magazines, which have a different structure and a much stronger bias towards the use of images. Except in such cases as the Re-Search publications and similar music books where publishers have tried to marry the two media, photographs are sometimes used in books to provide “breathing spaces” within the text, whereas in magazines they generally carry a lot more editorial momentum.
The design is largely a matter of pure common sense.
The grid must be well proportioned on the page, with adequate inner and outer margins. You must find out in advance how the book is to be bound, so that you know whether its pages will open easily or whether you must exaggerate the margin away from the spine.
Each book‘s character is largely developed out of detailing, such as the placing of headings and the choice of typeface. The jacket or cover is either the first or the last thing you do, and should signal the design and content as a whole.
lt is important to remember that as a designer you are working not only with a different temporal requirement, but, in most cases, a more deliberate and personal kind of expression. With this in mind, the design has to strike the right balance between passivity and intrusion. In the case of magazines that are around for a limited period, the design of an article or feature must immediately encourage the reader to read it. You can never take it for granted that this will happen. With books, you can, or at least you should be able to.
Book design must support the act of reading its printed pages, which naturally demands more time than it takes to get through a double-page spread in a magazine.
Space is as important a factor in a book as it is anywhere else. The design must be finely weighted so that the type has an impressive overall appearance, but not so much that it encourages the reader to stare at the page at the expense of the words themselves. lf you are going to choose a typeface other than a sympathetic book fount like Garamond, Times or Bodoni Book, then you must be sure that the content supports such a deviation. The subject matter might be so indistinct that it helps to produce a more expressive element – a typeface such as Corvinus or Rockwell, for example. As usual, you work to the given task, not to the given norm.
There is another side to book design which does not usually arise in magazine work-the choice of paper stock. The texture of the paper should support the book‘s literary style and the typeface(s) chosen for it.
For example, it would be no use selecting Bodoni, with its very fine serifs, if you planned to print on a rough matt surface – unless, of course, you actually intended the type to break up. Once again, if you are going to opt for a more distinctive design, you have to consider the book‘s potential lifespan. With any design, a good question to ask yourself is
“What will it look like in five years time?”
I must say that I much prefer doing a cover to designing an entire book. Who wouldn‘t? Designing a 200-page book involves a great amount of work for what is usually a small return.
Some publishers are their own worst enemies – although it is important to “never judge a book by its cover”, the opposite most often applies now.
The inside design is still somehow taken for granted, as if the writer had already designed the page. When the designer‘s function is encouraged as a profession, not unlike that a doctor or a solicitor, it becomes a service industry that keeps it apart from the creative process. The future of the book as a means of communication is itself in the balance.1 Perhaps it has already been lost to the more “democratic” emotions of popular music. More and more information, once the domain of books, is being transferred to computer disc and microfilm. You cannot browse through data banks.