What I Know About Book Design

Nikolski, which was designed by CS Richardson

Regrettably what I don’t do is make much of a living at it. So until that moment arrives, and under society’s fussy rules concerning putting a roof over one’s head and food in the bellies of one’s children, I am bound to pursue more lucrative employment.

So I design books for other writers. It’s a job that fixes the shingles, buys the groceries and has done so for twenty-odd years.

I’ve designed perhaps 1500 books. Novels, novellas, and epics. Short stories, linked stories, snap fiction. Children’s books, self-help manuals, investment guides, ten-ways-to-lose-ten-stone diet plans, bloated art books, lithe poetry collections, celebrity tell-alls, political manifestos, cookery, gardening, new age, old history, religion, life, death. I’ve even designed books about design. And through the sheer accumulated weight of all that paper, all that writing, all those authors, here’s what I know:

Every country publishes beautiful books. And every country thinks every other country’s books are ugly.

In the UK having the letter P in the publisher’s name is somehow linked with how good their books look. To whit: Phaidon, Penguin, Portobello.

More name-dropping: Assouline (France), Taschen (Germany), Kodansha (Japan), Pantheon (USA), Douglas & McIntyre (Canada). Consistently smart, consistently creative, consistently beautiful. And the charmingly termed “boutique” presses everywhere. (Apparently the smaller the publisher, the lovelier the book.)

Deity: Alan Fletcher. Scripture: The Art of Looking Sideways.

The ugliest books in the world are self-published. Thankfully, like the quality of self-published writing, this is beginning to change.

Definitions: A cover designer is not a book designer. A cover designer creates small posters (swank though they may be) that are held up by the books they are stuck to. A book designer designs the thing entire, covers and interiors. A really good designer can even typeset the book. A truly gifted designer knows the historic origins of drop caps and as much about punctuation as the copy editor.

En dashes (with spaces for-and-aft) are a sign of the devil.

Style. Manuals. Are. Tyranny. Full. Stop.

If a reader spends more time complaining about the size of the type than they do reading the words themselves, then design has failed that reader.

If the first thing a reviewer says about a novel is that it is “handsome”, the author has every right to shoot the designer.

Because a book is “emotional” doesn’t mean it should look like a sympathy card you’d receive from dear Aunt Agatha.

The writer writes, the editor edits, the sales representative sells, the publisher publishes. But everyone designs. Even Aunt Agatha.

At the end of the day it is the author’s book. Designers should remember this, stop showing off, and serve the work.

When it comes to designing books, form not only follows function, it dusts the furniture, takes out the trash, and makes a lovely cup of tea.

Design Law #1: The more people involved in how a book looks, the uglier the book becomes.

The average consumer will no more buy a book if the author’s name (foil-stamped and embossed) fills the entire cover than they will run screaming from the shop if it doesn’t.

There’s a perceived truth in publishing that states one must be able to read what’s on a cover from forty feet away. The trouble is there isn’t a bookshop in the world that has forty feet of sweeping vista where one can stand back and give it a try.

Audrey Hepburn

Black is no more a depressing colour for a book cover than white is cheery and uplifting. Audrey Hepburn wore black. She looked fantastic.

An editor once told me he didn’t want the murder mystery he was publishing to have a “gruesome” cover. This despite the fact that the novel’s protagonist dispatched her victims by disembowelment then fried up the entrails with bacon and kippers and fed the lot to her yappy dog. So much for reflecting the content on the cover.

If the book concerns a circus of dancing fish and a one-eyed midget ringmaster, one needn’t put mambo-mad mahi-mahi and a diminutive cyclops on the cover. Put another way: if a cover is obvious, redundant, and banal and treats the reader like an idiot, the reader will probably do something idiotic. Like not buy the book.

Publishers will spend days, weeks, months fretting over a cover design. The average browser in a bookshop will spend less than a second contemplating same. Half of them will hate it. The other half were probably in the wrong section of the shop to begin with.

No, I did not design my first novel. Nor will I design my next one. With rare exception, I think a writer who designs their own work should be worrying about other things. Like writing it. And the name of my UK publisher begins with P, so I know I am in very good hands.

CS Richardson
March 2009