The end of year approaches, bringing that time to reflect on what it’s all about.
It’s easy to let the production aspects of any job overwhelm your daily work, whether it’s the deadline of completing tasks to deliver a book on time, mastering a particularly challenging feature of InDesign, selecting the best typeface for a specific project, or devising an attractive layout that presents the information on the page in an engaging manner. These are all elements that comprise the day-to-day occupation of a book designer.
Ultimately, our greatest satisfaction in designing books doesn’t come from any one activity. It’s all about the whole thing: the book, obviously. But it’s not about holding the book in our hands, viewing our design. For us, it’s all about providing the author with a superbly designed book, a book that the author loves, a book that brings the author’s vision and words to life on the page.
We’re thankful to our great clients who give us the opportunity everyday to design books.
YES YES YES! You captured the values of book design perfectly! It can be extremely rewarding, even with the occasional frustrating challenges book designers run into throughout the process. Excellent post, Jeff! I am going to cross-post this to our site, The Open Publishing Guide. Thanks!
Jeff,
Lovely, and right on. Explaining this is sometimes difficult, but you’ve done a nice job. How do you say, “Yes, I’m designing your book, but my real aim is to get out of the way so you and your reader can have unimpeded communication, while your book still expresses your ideas typographically”? Always enjoy your posts, thanks.