Making a Book Step Three: Design, Layout and Cover

The Read’s third in a series suggested by a bookseller, who told Booksellers New Zealand: “I'd like to see a series of articles about how a book is made.”

The writer has written, the editor has edited, now our non-fiction illustrated book arrives on the designer’s desk, usually as a disk containing the edited script and the illustrations.

We are switching to the personal this week, talking to Katrina Duncan who is a designer finalist in tonight’s PANZ Book Design Awards for Blue Smoke and Group Architects and fiction specialist Anna Egan-Reid.

Katrina (pictured right) is Auckland University Press’s design guru, and it is a surprise to find that her degree is in sociology rather than art. She joined AUP in the early days of Pagemaker, got to use the program, and her design career evolved.

As the company’s Senior Designer, Katrina gets involved with the book project when the manuscript is accepted by AUP Director Sam Elworthy. She contributes to the discussion about what the format will be, whether it will be illustrated, and whether the illustrations will be colour throughout or a mix of colour and black and white. (A contract designer for a publisher would have much the same briefing when they are booked to do a project.)

IMAGE: Katrina Duncan by Nigel Gardiner.

Then she doesn’t see the project again for another three to four months...

Jump to the disk’s arrival: what then?

“I have a good look at everything on the disk, read a chapter or two; next I do a few sample layouts and send them to Sam, to the production editor and the author for feedback,” says Katrina.

“I don’t feel overwhelmed, because it has been in the back of the head between briefing and when I get the content.”

The link between designer and author is very important to illustrated non-fiction book design, Katrina believes.

With Group Architects, one of her two nominated PANZ Design Award titles, it was imperative that the photos were in close relation to the text on the particular houses and topics. “And I got far more photos than I could ever include.”

She faced the same dilemma with her other finalist Blue Smoke.

“Chris Bourke turned up with a disk of 600 photographs and they were all good! Fortunately he had colour coded an index as in red for must use, and other colours for good-if-you-could use, and so on.

IMAGE: A double-page spread from Blue Smoke

“I pretty much followed the same process for both -- made my choices, sent a chapter to the author, got their feedback, shuffled things around and carried on. At the same time, I'm also having to be conscious of keeping to the planned page extent. So it is quite a jigsaw – and a lot of fun!”

From the outside, it looks daunting, but major books like these take only a month to six weeks when Katrina gets cracking - though she is always working on more than one title at a time. “I worked on Blue Smoke at the same time as a book called Dining Out, memorable because I kept having to switch from music to food.

As AUP’s designer, she is responsible for designing between 20 – 25 books a year, so it is lucky the biographies, poetry books and other AUP output is a lot less demanding.

Though poetry is more tricky than it looks, says Katrina. “There tends not to be a straight left margin.” But design turnaround for poetry is only about two days of Katrina’s time.

As with most designers, Katrina has a handful of favourite fonts (type designs) that she uses regularly. She also keeps up with new styles in fonts and illustrations by reading in the area, following blogs and ‘looking at a lot of other books’.

Many publishers entrust the cover design of their illustrated non-fiction to the book’s designer, but at AUP Katrina turns to other designers with whom she regularly collaborates, including Spencer Levine (pictured right), Keely O’Shannessy, Sarah Maxey, Kalee Jackson, Carolyn Lewis and Athena Sommerfeld.

Blue Smoke and Group Architects have very different styles of cover, but the designer for both was freelancer Spencer Levine.

His challenges with each cover were very different. Group Architects may appear on the face of it to be more simple, but Spencer points out that he submitted 10 or 12 different covers for consideration because there were a lot of good photographs.

“To find one image that was a summary of the book was not easy; and once we had found the image then the typeface had to be sympathetic.”

In contrast, he only presented two design choices for Blue Smoke. The one that was chosen, two montages of many musicians separated by the title graphic, involved hours of photo-shopping from around 60 images.

It turned into a labour of love: “When you are freelance you can blow the budget if you choose. I did it because I was enthusiastic and I thought it was the right cover for the book. Just one image wouldn’t have summed up 50 years of Kiwi music. For the time I spent my hourly rate would have been minimal!”

Fiction Interiors
Anna Egan-Reid (pictured right) is a designer who has worked on a number of Penguin’s fiction titles and is now in-house for the company. The first step for her fiction book interior design is receiving a brief from the editor, usually including the cover art.

“The brief tells you the feeling that they want for the text, with ‘clean’ and ‘elegant’ examples of the words that can be used. I read the synopsis and a chapter or two to get a feel for the writing, and usually a few fonts pop into my head.

“There are other restrictions imposed by the book’s size. If the book’s size is a tight fit for the content, only a few typefaces are suitable.”

Anna likes to make each book look different from the next and enjoys working on the books of well known authors, mentioning Laurence Fearnley’s The Hut Builder and a new title from Linda Olsson.

“I can almost see the design before I create it; in the early days I used to try up to 12 fonts, now I mostly get it in one.” Creativity may be added by choosing an appropriate display font and flourish for chapter headings.

Though she is a legend for her fiction interiors, the design parameters are opening up for Anna at Penguin to include big format full colour books.

If her work on fiction interiors doesn’t leap out at you, that’s fine says Anna.

“The challenge is to make it look easy, but that rests on the strength of the type chosen – good design should be unnoticed.”

Article by Jillian Ewart, writer for The Read