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Why typography matters

Today I would like to recommend an excellent book I came across recently: Typography for Lawyers: Essential Tools for Polished and Persuasive Documents, by Matthew Butterick.

I was struck by its precision. Even the title elegantly clues us in about how much we can learn from this book and (for me, anyway) how much potential it offers for applying its information far beyond just the legal profession. It fills a simple need that has gone without remedy for so long, and yet somehow no one noticed its absence. I expect that is the nature of brilliant ideas—we wish we'd thought of it—and written it—first. 

As one might expect, the book is designed and produced impeccably. It is a wonderful reminder of how clear and instructive a well-designed reference book can be.

Typography for Lawyers rightly has received several excellent reviews in posts throughout the typographic blogosphere. It made me realize that it's possible to divide every person's reading material into two broad categories—what they want to read and what they have to read. To my mind, legal documents are the epitome of the have-to-read. While it may contain life-altering information we must understand—isn't that why we are warned repeatedly to "read the fine print"?—often it is expressed through such convoluted syntax and presented in a manner so mind-numbingly repetitive as to seem intended to obfuscate.

Bringing clarity back to what might otherwise become a data morass reminds me that the term text (as noun, not verb) once all but demanded an accompanying adjective—instructions, contract, dialog, poetry, etc.—to clarify its intent. Such modifiers, in turn, suggested how specific typographic conventions associated with it should look.

As text morphs inexorably into content that meanders from page to screen to tablet to mobile device, how much meaning is being ignored or lost when attention to its presentation is abandoned in favor of generic displays that accommodate the widest range of media?

Does your book designer listen?

Do you find that some graphic designers do not listen attentively to your requests, and often get too caught up in their own goals?

For more than 16 years, Vern Associates has built its reputation on the firm belief that listening effectively to our clients is the only way to give them the products they want and need. It is also a basic courtesy, and we strive to be courteous at all costs.

Perhaps the single most important step in arriving at a successful book design is meeting with the client at a project's outset. During that meeting, the majority of the discussion originates with the client, and I must listen effectively, which comprises a three-step process:

1. Listen as the client describes his or her vision for the project, establishes the goals of the publication and the requirements it must address, and summarizes problems that need to be solved.
2. Reflect back what I have heard, to confirm my understanding and correct any misperceptions.
3. Follow up with a design memo that outlines specific methods and approaches that I recommend employing in order to resolve the specific issues discussed.

But I've been told by too many clients that this is not part of a typical meeting with their designers, so I'm curious to learn how your book's designer has not listened to your instructions or fulfilled your requests. Along with that, it would be good to know when and how you determined that miscommunication had occurred. Tell me about the problem you have (in the comments box, below), and I will reply with some ideas about how to readjust how you work with your designer to accomplish your publication goal.

A number of my blogs concern the nuts-and-bolts aspects of illustrated book design and the ways in which effective preparation helps to avoid unnecessary revisions, costs, schedule delays, and a great deal of stress all around. Three of them are:

• The 5 Ws of Illustrated-Book Design (Parts 1 and 2)

• Production pitfalls to avoid in illustrated book design

• Content as words and illustrations, not empty calories

Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks, Peter

illustration courtesy Dr. ZAx / Flickr

My work as a freelance illustrated-book designer

When a client asks me to design and lay out an illustrated book, and I know that their staff will oversee all that comes before and after my part of the process, it's a gift that makes work feel about as luxurious as it can get. I can focus all my attention on the work I most enjoy. Rather than being project manager, I get to be can be project managed.

My illustrated-book design clients and I share a mutual respect and and an appreciation for one another's work. We have come to count on each other to bring the requisite skills and resourcefulness needed to handle every unexpected curve thrown our way in the course of their project.

But I have a branding issue. Some potential clients whose work I admire are apparently unwilling to consider hiring me because I refer to myself as Creative Director of Vern Associates, illustrated-book packager, rather than Peter Blaiwas, freelance illustrated-book designer. 

My partner and I run a two-person business. We love what we do, have done it for a long time, and are very good at it. We call ourselves illustrated-book packagers because some clients want us to produce their books from concept to finished product. 

Because we traditionally have chosen to oversee most of the work ourselves, we have an intimate acquaintance with the ins and outs of all aspects of editorial, design, production, and manufacturing processes. It's hard work, and we do it out of devotion to quality, not from a requirement to control.

Many other book packagers employ larger staffs and pay higher overhead than we. They often insist on packaging the entire project as a way to keep the job profitable. This apparently has encouraged the assumption that all book packagers require complete project management, and I am afraid that has kept a number of production, project, and publication managers from even considering working with me as a designer.

If they are concerned that I might question their actions and decisions in their area of expertise, they needn't worry. After all, why would anyone do that if they hoped to continue working with that client? However, as I know from experience, that sort of worry suggests that the person is someone seriously engaged in his or her own work—and that is the type of client for whom I want to work.

So you see my branding quandary. Any suggestions or comments readers might care to share will be very welcome.

Book Packager or Services Provider—Why Either/Or?

Once upon a time, I assumed that owning and managing our own business would become easier. Looking back, I wonder where that naive notion came from. The size of a business does not exempt it from an important dictate that any other business or, really, aspect of life must acknowledge: the more you learn, the more there is to be learned.

Many of the issues we faced early on—taming bookkeeping software, figuring out how to budget job by job as well as year by year, developing boilerplate contract language that is both clear and fair, for example—have given way to new challenges. We even face learning curves that didn't exist in 1994, but one remains as pressing or more so than ever—marketing.

This brings me to today's topic, but rather than trying to offer ideas or suggestions, I'm going to devote this blog to asking readers for your ideas about a particular marketing problem we have faced for most of Vern Associates' history: How do we help a potential client understand what we really offer and how that can help them with their publication needs?

For a case in point, let's look at just one branch of our work: museum books. When we began business, most medium-sized and all large museums supported their own in-house publications departments. Even though these departments regularly assigned editing and design and production duties to freelance service providers, few worked with packagers, who could have put all the pieces together.

The economic roller coaster that hit the rails a few years later, however, caused numerous midsized museums to disband their publications divisions, even though they continued to publish their own books. They still farmed out most or all of the work required to bring their books into being, but now they added the management of the publication process to the workload of their already heavy-laden curators. We expected this to be a boon. After all, we could take on the whole shebang. Vern Associates is a one-stop means to continue publishing without having to manage the work doled out to a disparate band of individual service providers.

From the very start of our business, we have considered the collaborative, all-in-one-office nature of what we offer to be a strong, value-added proposition. Our editorial "wing" works closely in-house with the design/layout/production team. At every stage, each knows the book intimately and is aware of exactly where it stands in its gestation. In addition, our editorial personnel are thoroughly versed in book design, just as the design and production folks are aware of and sensitive to editorial concerns.

But somehow that proposition has worried, even alienated, potential clients, and a good number of whom seem unwilling to recognize that we by no means consider this integrated manner of book production to be mandated. Our trusted staff members frequently augment packaging work with jobs that call for their own individual expertise. For example, I recently edited a book for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, but Peter didn't see it until a bound copy arrived in the office. Meanwhile, the new book for Winterthur was almost entirely his doing. It came to him with edited manuscript and art program in place. Winterthur even supplied the proofreading and commissioned and edited the index.

So, what are we missing? Why don't museums' in-house staff recognize that we offer individually the skills and expertise that play so well together to make up a package? A long-time museum publications staff member recently mentioned that he refuses to meet with packagers—even those like VAI, who willingly shed the inclusive cloak of an all-in-one service provider. He has always outsourced design and even production, just as his editorial colleagues do, but he doesn't trust the individuals working for a packager not to "do too much."

When Vern Associates is the client, we expect to call the shots. We are paying another business to provide something we need, and it must be exactly what we require. So why would we expect the situation to be any different when feet and shoes get swapped?

We would love to hear your opinions and suggestions that can help unravel this seeming conundrum.

Is this the model for E-marketing?

We are inundated with offers to improve our search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, social media strategies for nurturing new leads and resuscitating dormant ones, and ways to become a "trusted source" to clients. (This last moniker is taking some getting used to—I had finally almost gotten comfortable with "vendor.")

As book producers, we get a substantial response to our marketing efforts from businesses who want to sell their services to us, at times making it unclear just who is selling what to whom. It takes time to distinguish between the sales material sent by services offering to help us sell our own services and that sent by companies simply trying to sell us their own services and products.

This confusion underscores the desperation that underlies a fiercely competitive marketplace in a sour economy. Worse, it suggests that while we're all trying to sell to each other, the real clients are working with those who have found other—effective—approaches.

We work with an inbound marketing consultant who also hosts our website, blog, and landing pages. Inbound marketing helps us create and disseminate content in ways that help potential clients find our website and get in touch to ask for help.

We blog on a regular basis, send emails to targeted lists, and have started working on a monthly newsletter. We receive lots of assistance from our marketing consultant; some valuable, some less so. It takes time to figure out what works for us. Once we sort out that material, we need to adapt its implementation to the time constraints of a very small business. Even the most modest campaigns would fill the schedule of a part-time marketing manager, but Brian and I are responsible for all aspects of our business—creative, managerial, marketing, administrative (not necessarily in that order).

To date, the only marketing strategy that has been predictably successful is issuing "content" that will make our clients' jobs easier. Unquestionably, Item #1 on their list of requirements is a way to save them money, and our best solutions arise from showing how to avoid unanticipated and unnecesary expense. So our biggest marketing challenge is devising new, persuasive methods to get that message across in every marketing piece we deliver.

Custom-Built vs. Template-Driven Book Design: 4 Considerations

We once bid on a project for an independent school's anniversary book. Of the six packagers with hats thrown into the ring, we were among the five unsuccessful bidders. Despite our disappointment, we were fortunate that a couple of the decision makers shared their thoughts with us afterward. The most intriguing observations we gleaned concerned use of a template to make a new illustrated book.

The school issued a detailed RFP, so we knew about its previous publications (some still in print, most not), got to know what writing styles and approaches the committee members liked (and didn't), and even received bios of the decision makers. Most important, it turns out, was the anniversary book recently published by a nearby independent school in the same league (athletic, at least) as our potential client, which was held up as exemplary of what the committee sought.

But we were still confused: The RFP stipulated a vertical trim and about half the pictures were to be printed in color, but the exemplar volume was oblong, and all its pictures were duotones. We interpreted such discrepancies to mean that the specs were flexible and quoted costs for a book that corresponded more closely to the RFP specs.

As it turned out, we should have paid closer attention to what was said about the existing book. The successful bidder, who also was packager of the admired example, followed its previous text approach and specifications to the letter, as if not RFP existed.

The takeaway is that we cannot assume that a client wants its wheel reinvented. Template-based publications have always been anathema to the way we work, but clearly they have their place. When a potential client shows a prototype they like, it may not be their idea of fun or wisdom or expedience to stray from that approach. When they have in hand proof of what is possible, it may be nearly impossible for them to visualize books with varying specs or editorial and design approaches. At the same time, something new and different should not be ruled out simply due to a lack of information.

The four considerations that follow may help publication committees and decision makers determine whether to adopt a template-driven or custom-built approach to their new publication. (Of course, my observations and comments apply just as much to corporate histories or books published by nonprofit organizations, but since these musings arose as a result of a bid for an independent school's anniversary history, I focused on that segment of our client base.)

1. Aren't template-driven books more affordable?
Not necessarily. Although counterintuitive, neither approach can be relied upon to be more cost effective. Some large, well-known book producers work only with template-driven books, turning their resultant savings in editorial/design/production costs to underwrite hefty operating costs, with a net result of a big price tag. And shoehorning new material and intentions into an established grid can occasion more work and expense than developing a new approach based on the content at hand.

2. Will your readers care?
While we pride ourselves on shaping each project to the individual needs and desires of our client, that may not be important in every instance. Consider who will read your anniversary book and how likely they are to be familiar with similar publications from other independent schools. Even if they are acquainted with other examples, will they be bothered by similarities? In our experience, ca. 65 to 85 percent of anniversary-book recipients are alumni or parents—that is, people who aren't apt to see numerous other examples. On the other hand, a template-driven piece is likely to be disadvantageous if you plan to use it as a development and publicity tool.

3. Perhaps your school's visual content is all you need to set the book apart...
One independent school history we produced benefited greatly from an extensive, meticulously organized archive of visual material that had been collected assiduously throughout the school's long tenure. With that breadth, depth, and variety of imagery at hand, even a template-driven design would stand apart. On the other hand, another history we produced relied on an endless array of head shots of past executives, and it took extensive photo research and design originality to enliven it into a volume that appealed to its intended audience.

4. What image do you wish to convey to the book's readers?
Not every independent school will welcome outsiders' notions that it takes risks, pushes envelopes, or relies on nontraditional teaching methods. If its long-lived reputation rests on teaching a particular canon in a time-honored way, the educational institution may wish to adhere closely to a norm, making a template-driven book appropriate. Conversely, a school's reputation as progressive could suffer just as much from a type-bending layout that makes its reading a challenge.

Photo credit: "A'Beckett Tower—cropped," by Alpha (Melbourne, Australia)

Infographics, cartography, and e-readers

Over the course of the past few blogs, I have been discussing some issues that designers need to address when formatting content—specifically text—for e-readers and PC tablets. That the technology for these devices and their apps are still in the early stages of development is evidenced by the limited, cumbersome presentation of much reading material. If you want to read a novel and are not too particular about its formatting, you are well-positioned to be an e-book reader, and judging from ebook industry sales reports, a great many people are more than satisfied with the products as they now stand.

When it comes to displaying art of any kind on an e-reader, however, it's a different story. Imagery can be problematic because digital reproduction for both video and still pictures were developed for viewing on computer monitors, which, on average, have grown consistently larger. With all that room to spread out, larger and more detailed images became available to a wider computer audience.

The recent shift toward much smaller e-readers and PC tablets re-introduced the conundrum of how to display large, complex images efficiently as well as effectively. Even zooming in or out of details is an ungainly process on a portable digital device, in part because magnification and reduction ratios are still based on the dimensions of a laptop or desktop monitor.

This becomes particularly problematic for the display of charts, tables, graphs, and especially maps. Generally, in order for them to be useful tools for comparison and contrast, information graphics must be seen in their entirety. A map used as a reference tool, rather than solely for navigation, needs to be divided into a grid so one can employ one or more reference point(s) from the smaller quadrants to the whole.

I wonder if the key to presenting info-graphics on smaller devices will be found in that familiar grid of quadrants that helps locate a desired detail within the larger picture. After all, isn't that old standby, the folding-paper road map, both an information graphic and a hand-held navigation device?

The E-Reader as Book-Selection Tool

In a blog posted at the end of January, I confessed that I was about to buy a Kindle. Looking back, I think I used that post, in part, to force my own still-reluctant hand. Having spent many hours over the past two-plus months learning the ropes, I can unashamedly report that I have become a convert. And a big part of that conversion resulted from discovering the economic upside to e-reading.

A couple of weeks ago I read yet another anti-ebook screed. This time, the writer gleefully refutes the pro-ebook "it saves trees" argument by citing in stultifying detail how the minerals used to make an e-reader are far likelier than the use of paper to destroy the world as we know it. (I still can't shake a visual of him furiously poking away at the keyboard attached to his mineral-laden PC, oblivious to his own sophistry, but that's okay, it makes me grin.) What I find particularly egregious in this particular rant is the writer's failure (unwillingness?) to consider the economics involved.

A tally of the books I've bought over the past three years reveals a total just north of 160. Of them, three were full-price purchases from bookstores—new offerings by favorite authors, which made me pretty certain they would remain in my library for years to come (N.B., just one has). The rest were priced 40 percent or more below their cover prices, which is the only way I can afford to take chances on interesting premises or writers about whom I've heard good things or (I admit it) enticing covers. (Of those 160-some titles, 37 remain on my shelves, most still to be read.) Positing an admittedly low average per-book cost of $11, that amounts to $1,760. When I add in the three extravagances (at $30 a pop), it looks like I spent about $1,850, or roughly $620 a year.

Like so many book lovers, I am continually running out of room to house, or novel ways of shelve, additional volumes, but what I really lack is sufficient "discretionary income" to permit me to take a flyer on whatever catches my eye in a bookshop or a review, ad, or catalog.

Enter the Kindle. Today, if I'm interested in a title that's available in a compatible electronic format, I just download a free sample. Usually the length of a chapter or two, the excerpt provides a clear idea of how interested I really am in the publication, how much I like the tone and quality of its writing, and whether its overall subject warrants purchasing a copy—whether via Kindle or bound book.

Sample reading provides thorough familiarity and is far more helpful than what I glean while standing at a bookstore's New Arrivals table or in a library's stacks. In the two-plus months I've had my Kindle, its e-shelves have become populated with 39 publications—from the complete works of Goethe to a wonderful new book by Jenny Diski called What I Don't Know About Animals. The former cost nothing, the download of the latter was $13.42.

Although I had read several snippets about Diski's new book, the sample boon became apparent once downloaded. It was about 25 pages long—plenty to provide all the evidence I need to know it's a keeper. Meanwhile, I have also downloaded samples of 10 other titles, one of which I am saving up to buy in hardcover; the other 9, while pretty much all wastes of time, didn't cost a cent.

Nearly everyone has a story of reticence to adopt a new idea, technique, or method, and common to them is the lesson that I re-learn with every such "growth experience": It's never as simple as "either/or"....

When one switches to something new, neither complete nor immediate renunciation of previous ways of doing things is entailed. There is always room to retain prior approaches, and e-reading may be a more cogent example of this lesson than most. As Seth Godin, who definitely knows about such things, calls a book a "fabulous souvenir, a long-lasting, easily displayed, easily shared, makes-you-happy remembrance of an idea."

My love for and devotion to printed books hasn't waned in the least, and I certainly have no intention either to cease buying them or dispense with my library. But the Kindle permits me to make far better judgments before spending, and the money saved can be used to add to my collections of paper-based books that cannot be replaced with electronic facsmiles, not even with the highest-end technology presently available. So, here's my attempt at a new equation:

     increased reading
+   more adventurous literary exploration
=   reduced stress,
     greater pleasure, and
     clearer perspectives
     (not to mention significantly fewer TV hours clocked.....)

E-books and Editorial Design—Cart? Or Horse?

Graphic design for illustrated books—in fact, most editorial design—is conservative by nature. This is only my opinion, of course, and many designers and quite a few of my clients may disagree. Sustaining the reader's interest and attention throughout a long-form publication imposes a great many strictures on the designer: consistency, legibility, balance, and spaciousness, to name just a few. But contrary to what the adjective suggests, conservative design need not be predictable, uninteresting, timorous, or rigid. Some of the most exciting design solutions I've achieved or witnessed tended to result from working within a very narrow range of possibilities.

Because innovation shines particularly bright when it appears in apparently mundane places, I've found numerous enjoyable challenges when thinking illustratively about seemingly arid subjects. I honed this ability during a stint designing book jackets and interiors for computer programmers, electrical engineers, and business management professors. Working with such clients was a formidable and humbling task. It required that I locate the source of their great enthusiasm for their field and find a way to illustrate it so that "general audience" readers could share, or at least understand, the authors' excitement.

In much of what I have read about the development and progress of e-books, a lot of attention is paid to the wonderful things you can do with (and to) digital content, but not much relates either to the act of reading or the physical limitations of the vehicle—the e-reader. And since such a wide variety of approaches to the way in which various brands of e-reading hardware interpret the many different types of digital files, "e-book design" remains kind of a crap shoot.

So it seems to me that a resourceful book designer must face the limitations of both the medium and the vehicle, then play to their strengths. That's what I'm trying to do, and it's not easy, but so far I've come up with two particular strengths that offer some design opportunities.

First, scalable text. My 54-year-old eyes really appreciate a good zoom feature, so it is crucial for the e-text designer to choose fonts  that maintain good proportion and contrast at a wide variety of point sizes.

The other strength—or potential strength—stems from e-readers', iPads', and other tablets' basic nature. Many of these devices seem to strive to work just like printed books. Even apps that incorporate lots of animation remain, for the time being at least, scrolling versions of printed book pages. So why not treat that as an advantage rather than something to work around?

I try to imagine designing a long, narrow scroll. It doesn't have sidebars, or wraparound text, or extra-wide tables and graphs, or crossover anything. It maintains an open, respectful space for art between blocks of text and won't appreciate—or even recognize—a deep sink for chapter openers.

That's a start. The technology will develop and improve, and e-book design will advance from nonexistent to rudimentary to work that designers can be proud of. "Seamless" progress from paper to digital book is improbable, wishful thinking devised by marketers, and it muddies the progress editorial and design professionals can make toward creating truly innovative publications.

I believe that consumers will discover quickly what is mere novelty and what is truly valuable. Ultimately, they will dictate with their wallets the shape the e-reading experience takes. As the buyers and end-users of this still-new reading apparatus, we are capable of knowing what we want and demanding it, rather than slavishly buying the latest thing in order to discover what it doesn't offer.

Corporate Anniversary Books: 2 Early-Phase Considerations

Recently Joan, a former client, called for a catch-up chat and to let me know about her promotion to director of communications, several steps above her role when we worked together. She said that she still relies heavily on the anniversary book we produced back then, and that today it is actually more valuable as a marketing tool than when it was first published six years ago.

During our collaboration, I sometimes kidded her that I planned to clone her so each of our future projects would come with a similarly terrific colleague and run as smoothly. So what she said next really startled me: After her boss assigned the anniversary book project to Joan, she "back-burnered" putting it in motion for almost two years. Why? She was worried she didn't know enough about book production even to begin the discussion with book packagers.

"I guess I didn't know what I didn't know, and the whole thing simply stymied me," she admitted.

Joan's remark made me wonder how much immersion in publishing methods and costs others in her position think they need before jumping into the process of developing an anniversary publication. Several ideas about preparing for first-phase discussions with book producers or publishers came to mind, and I will share some of them over the next few weeks. While this post deals specifically with organizations developing anniversary books, the suggestions are applicable to most long-form publication projects.

#1: Must I know book-making basics before actually beginning my project?

As with most pursuits, numerous paths can lead to a satisfactory outcome (i.e., an anniversary book that reflects well upon your company and has a long, valuable life as a marketing and/or development tool). For many such pursuits, these paths are well trod, clear cut, and visible from the outset. Not so for book production, however. It is my firm belief that every publication worth its paper (or pixels) has its own peculiar DNA that will dictate what needs, challenges, and development issues will be faced. Therefore, hours of preliminary study of the publication process won't help much.

Certainly, you can consult any number of books and websites about self-publishing, but they aren't likely to reveal a magic blueprint for your particular project. Books about publishing cannot—indeed, don't attempt to—take into account a specific book's "organic" growth. On the other hand, lack of awareness of other possible approaches is a prescription for unforeseen extra time (yours) and money (ditto), and in the end your publication falls short of the mark you've set.

2: Isn't not knowing the ins and outs of book production going to cost me?

Not being up on book-making procedures and budgeting won't cost nearly as much as delaying the project's launch. Consider these two givens for any anniversary publication:

(a) Because it will be used to celebrate a date-specific event, "late" isn't an option; and
(b) As the old advertising jingle queries, "Why wait for spring? Do it now—when there are folks who know how."

We encourage anniversary-bound clients to begin development of their publication no fewer than three years in advance. (Four or five years is much better, but attuning decision makers' radar that far in advance is completely impracticable.) We treat the three-year mark as start of a countdown, and in most cases we have noticed that each passing month generally ups the ante and leads to cost increases and a decrease in satisfaction with the finished product. As the months tick away, adjustments must be made to provide books for that still-firm release date—the client's "ideal" writer may not be available on short notice, say, or printing costs triple because shipping time precludes working at more distant, more economical plant venues.

Concern #2 should not be dismissed, however. Many disparate elements must be considered, and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. The way to make well-informed decisions is the same as it is for any other industry or service: seek multiple bids. Look to the book packagers from whom you request bids to answer all the questions—those you ask as well as the ones you didn't know needed consideration in the first place. (Frankly, I would be a little uncomfortable with any bidder who didn't raise issues that may seem out of left field. Knowing about these concerns up front can yield enormous benefits down the line.) Once you have gathered all the proposals, use the nature of their bidders' responses to help you determine how well they fit with your project, your in-house team, and your organization overall. Such scrutiny is apt to be as revealing as the bid's financial components.