Annotations

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.