Annotations

Powers of Ten, My Design Standard for Illustrated Books

Near the top of my list of "Books I Wish I'd Designed" is Powers of Ten, a collaboration of Philip and Phyllis Morrison with the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. It is as accessible and captivating to children as adults, which was apparently the intention of all of its creators: "The sketch should, Eames decided, appeal to a ten-year-old as well as a physicist; it should contain a ‘gut feeling’ about dimensions in time and space as well as a sound theoretical approach to those dimensions.”

The premise of Powers of Ten is the illustration of the infinitely large and small by locating the reader specifically within the universe. Some have used something similar to describe the Bible, but to my mind Powers of Ten is a lot more reader-friendly.

The concept was taken from a 1950s children's book, Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps. It was then made into a short (9-minute) film in 1968 that was adapted into this book in 1982. Both the frames of the film and the shape of the books are square. The starting point is a representation of an area that is 10 meters square (10⁰).The image within is an overhead view of a man and woman at a picnic. 

Next the view zooms out to an area 100 meters square (10m x 10m, or 10¹), then to 1,000 meters, and 10,000, until it represents the size of the observable universe—one billion light years away (10²⁴).

At the center of each square is another blue-ruled square representing the smaller area from the previous image. From a design perspective, these two concentric squares represent the basic components that graphic design involves: composition and proportion. That these two very flat shapes can form the structure for a three-dimensional voyage to infinity always reminds me of the unlimited possibilities offered by a blank page (or screen).

In the film, the viewer must remain a passenger who progresses forward in a linear fashion. In the book, however, the reader can move back and forth through time and space at will—he commands the voyage that unfolds on the right-hand page of each spread. The left-hand pages are four-column grids filled with pictures and text that bring to life each point in the voyage—its structure, texture, atmospheric conditions, and the life forms it supports.  

I have always loved illustrated books for offering the opportunity to read, learn, and understand backwards, forwards, sideways, or from the middle out, any way that makes sense to me. If I want, I can even start on the first page and read to the end of the book. Every page of Powers of Ten reminds me why I continue to be fascinated by the practice of graphic design. 

Content as words and illustrations, not empty calories.

I expect this is the reason I have always loved illustrated books—children's books, coffee table books, graphic novels—and have spent most of my career designing them. Illustrations give me a break from reading while offering a way to process information in a more immediate fashion. It's also why I consider information graphics (charts, graphs, tables, etc.) to be illustrative. Once finished with my "break," I can return to my place in the text more relaxed and better informed than when I left.

Fine Art Reproduction: Why (and How) We Look at Pictures Today

For three weeks now, I've been working on a blog about color correction for digital and print publications. I think I've developed decent skills in this area during my many years of work in graphic design and production, so I thought I could provide some tips readers might appreciate when left to fend for themselves while producing a publication.

I began by wrestling with ways to describe how to attain accurate reproduction of original artworks and display their images consistently across a variety of media. This brought me to consider the astonishing range of displays on which people can presently view the same, single image, and how widely color and contrast is likely to shift with each of those displays. Always developing printing capabilities skew things even further.

Then I considered how millions of people, like me, spend hours in front of computers, being deluged by countless images. When you contend with that kind of visual saturation on a daily basis, the only chance an image has to grab your attention is if there is something really wrong with it. Even then, I expect that such an egregious error would also need to be engaging enough to keep the viewer from scrolling and clicking.

As you can see, color correction had taken a back seat to a consideration of what it presently means to look at art.

On the print side, my company produces catalogs for museum exhibitions and collections as well as other kinds of books that deal with fine art and architecture. We share with our photographers, production managers, prepress techs, and printers the responsibility for controlling consistency and delivering accurate reproduction. While there is much room for error, the variables are manageable, and we all have the common goal of producing an accurate printed page. At every step along the way, we spend a great deal of time comparing and adjusting each piece in order to provide readers with a collection of images with which they will also want to spend time.

Lately, we have been considering how the great shift from print to digital publishing will affect our niche market of fine art publishing, and how best to utilize these new, always evolving technologies. We've met with  firms that adapt picture-driven books to e-book format. To date, the most successful of these are instructional titles (e.g., cooking, craft, and DIY books and magazines). But, chances are that the reader who spends time studying specific images or text in such books is doing so to clear up confusion about the subject rather than out of appreciation for the pictures.

I'd really like to know if some people would prefer to study a fine art reproduction on a monitor rather than on the printed page. I expect there are many who do, and no doubt I will find their reasons surprising.

I recently talked with a gallery owner who specializes in contemporary and vintage silver print photographs. We talked about how the tiny, rarified market for fine art photography books continues to shrink. He  suggested that the flood of digital images that has become available to everyone, everywhere could cause people to forget the pleasures of viewing photographic prints "in the flesh," which could easily lead to a wholesale loss of interest in attending photography exhibits at galleries or museums. An excessively gloomy forecast, perhaps, but it does cause me to wonder if we are all progressively losing our capacity for sustained visual attention.

Anniversary books and design firms: Resolve these five issues first

My March 24th post concerned hiring a design or marketing firm or an advertising agency to develop and produce a book about an organization's history. As I mentioned then, anniversary books are often longer and editorially more complex than the projects typically produced by such firms.

I also noted that the manuscript and art for such an anniversary book might not have received the necessary shaping, trimming, and focusing that a strong editorial hand can supply. So, even if you are confident in your completed manuscript, here are five crucial points to cover before commissioning a creative team.     

1. Previous experience
Requesting information as specific as possible on this point always works to your advantage. If the potential vendor assures you that there is no difference between the work he has produced and what you require, ask him why — specifically and in detail. You know much more and about your organization and are likely to have a clearer picture of the end product you want than he does. Once, when bidding to produce the history of an executive recruitment firm, we were summarily discounted because we did not have another executive recruitment firm's history in our portfolio. The client spent fifteen very illuminating minutes outlining why they required such particular experience.

2. Communication vs. intimidation
Do the prospective firms understand your business, your organization, your story? Do they effectively present to you your story — in terms related to your business — rather than explain how they approach their own work? I've attended design presentations, both as a designer and a client, at which I have seen too many design professionals rely heavily on design-speak. They seemed to use it as an effective means of intimidation, assuming that the best defense is a good offense. Resist these obvious tactics, and keep in mind that the presenter needs to prepare for the meeting by familiarizing himself with your work, not the other way around.

3. Samples of their work
If you want a cloth-bound, hardcover book with a French-fold* dust jacket and five-color, printed endpapers, the firm you hire needs to show you a sample of exactly that. Your vendor should be working with a printer who specializes in printing and binding illustrated, hardbound books. If not, you run a significant risk of cost over-runs, schedule delays, and compromises to the overall quality of the finished book.

4. Schedule, front-end and back end
Does the design firm you are interviewing understand the time frame your anniversary history requires? Imagine you have a total of 14 months in which to complete the project, but your designer doesn't realize it may take more than 12 of those months to complete the text and art research, interviews, writing, and editing. Such inexperience will turn into significant rush fees for production and printing, not to mention the chance of a missed deadline.

5. Will it last?
You expect the beautifully printed and bound book you have worked so hard to produce — this volume that commemorates the last however-many years of your organization — to have a shelf life of more than a few months. Many print publications incorporate very expensive techniques and materials, but are not expected to have the long and useful life of a well-made book. Printers and binders specializing in fine-quality illustrated books have the resources to offer the best prices on paper, printing, and binding materials that endure. Find out if the firm you are interviewing knows how to provide you with a beautiful book that will also last decades, not just years. Note, too, that the same kind of longevity should be expected from the book's look, feel and design. Trendy seldom equals lasting.

*A "french fold" dust-jacket is one with folded, double-thick edges along the book's perimeter, which assures greater durability and resistance to tearing.

A book packager's cost estimate: Beyond the ballpark

"Just so I can talk to my boss about it,
give me a ballpark figure for what this is going to cost us."

This problematic request is probably endemic to service-based businesses, and I sympathize with the people who ask it. If they have no notion of what it will cost, how can they move ahead with their book-production exploration? But, because each publication has its own personality and peculiarities, expenses and time requirements vary widely from project to project, which makes it nearly impossible to arrive at a preliminary, or ballpark, estimate worth the email it's "printed" on.

Here's the "ideal" process we try to follow in order to provide a reliable estimate. Right off the bat, project demands are divided into two categories: (1) cost of service (called "cost of goods sold" in other industries); and (2) manufacturing.

First Base: Cost of service for publications
Let's assume our client wants the soup-to-nuts package: project management, development, editorial (line and copy editing, proofreading, and indexing), design, art preparation, pre-press, and production. Every line item requires evaluation. A few questions we consider include:

• Has the writer ever completed a manuscript this complex?
• Is fact checking required?
• Are we expected to clear permissions to reprint text or pictures? How many? In what language(s)?
• Is a one-color (or a four-color or a six-color) design desired?
• Is the art in digital form, or must transparencies and hard copy be scanned and color corrected?
• What about the 27 charts and graphs—will they need to be redrawn?
• Do you want us to be present at the press check?

Questions such as these lead to broader considerations:

• Will we assign some of the work to freelance colleagues, or must our in-house staff do everything?
• How much time will be devoted to in-house editing or design or production?
• What about the schedule? Does the client want bound books yesterday?

We prefer to meet with our client to explore every requirement as well as any special procedures that may need to be implemented. During this meeting, we complete a page-long requisition of services. This needn't be a long or onerous process—it can be accomplished in as few as 15 minutes—and once that discussion is complete, the services needed for us to deliver a top-notch publication are understood by everyone involved.

Caveat: While this exploration takes a little more time up front, beware of the publication service provider who is ready and willing to reel off costs without first gaining a clear understanding of the project's intricacies and peculiarities. That way lies, if not madness, a sizable roster of added charges after the fact and severe headaches during the publication's gestation period.

Second Base: Manufacturing costs
Truth be told, it is usually easier to handicap the service requirements than the cost of printing, paper, and binding (PPB) and shipping, which we commission a printer and binder to provide. Here, too, we complete a page-long questionnaire, which sketches in a full, accurate description of the end product's specifications—trim size, page count, type of binding, weight and quality of paper, quantity for first printing, etc. We submit these specs to at least three vendors, and it takes at least a week, usually longer, for us to receive their bids.

Rounding Third: Putting it all together
Now we deposit all the estimates, considerations, and perceived elements into our hopper to determine what the publication will cost to produce, when we will need the raw materials, and when the project can be completed and delivered. Over the years, we have developed reliable spreadsheets to estimate costs and schedules, but they assume accuracy in the data entered.
 

 

Home Plate! We issue the proposal
Thousands cheer. General good feeling abounds.

So, you can see why off-the-cuff estimates tend to be unreliable, hence unwise. Nonetheless, clients' urgent pleas have prompted us to suggest ballpark figures based on similar past projects. Doing so always warrants a disclaimer—"this is not an estimate...,"—but the ballpark figure usually sees our client through an imminent committee meeting or budget projection.

Then why don't we do that more often? Frankly, because it just isn't sufficiently reliable. For example, take a book based on one we produced six years earlier. Today, editorial fees are, say, $5/hour higher; the previous project took eleven months, but the new one needs only nine; the paper is more expensive; and the quantity to be printed is twice as high. Any one of these considerations can skew the figures; taken together, the overall result can be fouled right out of the ballpark.

We continually improve our itemized cost-projection system, which we are honing to permit issuing reliable on-the-spot estimates. But, as with so many project-planning tasks, it still relies on best guesses and assumptions, and the umpire has yet to rule on that.

 

Anniversary books: "creative" and "content" are not oxymoronic.

The last thing any organization's harried communications director needs is to go through the complicated process of hiring a design firm/marketing firm/advertising agency to produce their history only to be met with: "We are ready to start, when will you send us the text, art, research, interviews, manuscript, and everything else?"

An annual report, for example, can easily reach book-length proportions. However, it's reasonable to expect that an annual report will begin with an overview of the previous year and end with lists of officers and board members. Moreover, altering the report's form would do little to enhance the content within and is even likely to make it more difficult to use.

A history that includes pictures, while nonfiction, is still a story, and integrating the ways both pictures and text drive that story is integral to creating an engaging illustrated book. 

The design of an illustrated history benefits from a close relationship between author, editor, and designer. Even a history as rudimentary as a chronological time-line will do more to engage the reader if each benchmark is carefully considered, reflecting the preceding entry and informing the subsequent.

As an illustrated-book producer, I have had the good fortune to be involved in the "building" of an illustrated book. The editor and I met with the book's two authors and its photographer (who documented the entire project) for a series of weekly brainstorming meetings on how to portray the way architect Frank Gehry's astonishing Stata Center came to be, from concept through design, execution, construction, and implementation.

Each week we would meet and discuss the many issues that needed to be addressed. The following week we returned with our various contributions, such as rough manuscript or rough layouts (sometimes both). These inspired further discussion of how to expand and develop the story.

I've experienced very few projects that have developed as organically as this one. It confirmed my concern that when a designer is handed all the components of a history and told to put them together, he or she could easily miss any number of opportunities to bring the story to life. For example, I have seen countless designers roll their eyes at the art they receive for a project, never considering what they could do to improve both the art and the project overall.

 

My partner, the editorial "wing" of our company, and I provide our clients with a simple, unique service that seems to be little known outside of the publishing world. When we receive a manuscript, we can furnish the client with an "art manuscript": we simply annotate the text with suggestions for photographs, art, or artifacts that enhance the story's progression. We offer this service whether we are developing a new manuscript with the author, editing a client's completed manuscript, or have received both edited manuscript and art program from a client. Our suggestions are always well received, but never more so than when a client's "photo research staff" is actually an overworked manager who had too much to do before the project landed on her desk. Such circumstances rarely foster inspiration. In fact, our art manuscripts have often inspired researchers to track down illustrations above and beyond our suggestions.

I have never considered the elements of graphic design as a collection of discrete components that need to be balanced and arranged. When words and pictures work side by side, they elevate even the most unlikely subject and bring its story to life. A client need never apologize for bringing what others might consider a "prosaic" topic to the table. Our goal is to reinvigorate the client—and the ultimate reader— to consider a familiar story with their own fresh, excited eyes.

Why I dislike reading online: a print publication designer grumbles

The 5 Ws of Illustrated-Book Design (Part 2 of 2)