Maybe someone should start a blog comparing the crap type in printed books with the crap type in ebooks, so that the publishers realize how little consumers will really be losing when they make the switch. I love real books, but if a time comes that I have to choose between a $10 eBook download and a $15 trade paperback typeset by someone who barely speaks english printed on paper I wouldn’t wipe my ass with, the book loses.

Imo, the cover is terrible, too. At least compared to the UK version…

You’re absolutely right, this isn’t anywhere near an atypical example; and it is physically painful to watch…

It looks like another case of "one from column A, one from column B" design. Rather than hire decent designers, they just trow together any damn thing from a recipe book and have it printed. There are plenty of capable designers out there but the bean-counters can shave a buck by not hiring any of them. It is also common practice for cover designers to never see the interior and vice versa.

ChrisL

Interesting that you pointed out that the cover design bears no relationship to the contents. I've been puzzled by this as it relates to movies the past decade or so -- now that trailers and posters seem to be made by folks who have no relationship or even contact with the people making the actual movie, it's quite jarring to have a really strong poster design for a particular title, and then have that identity totally thrown away during the title sequence, and then have the title sequence identity totally thrown away during the film.

Wow, the UK cover is so vastly superior. I hope someone in the US publishing office prints out those two covers somewhere and asks "why the hell are we using this cookie cutter design on a bestselling book?"

Very Very Dire. Too right.

The UK cover ‘design’ is horrible, too—design-wise much worse than the US cover—though at least it draws the eye, which I suppose is the ultimate goal of any book cover.

Well, I think design-wise, the UK cover is better, though the type is difficult to read. The UK cover is more emotive, unique, and eye-catching, as well as I think conceptually representing the subject of the book better. The sheet music on the US cover looks like a generic stock photo they found in 20 seconds looking for the keyword "music", and the overall tone seems almost...depressing.

I'm curious, other than the legibility of the light, reversed type (which is certainly no minor thing when you're talking about a book cover, I agree), is there anything else about the US cover you think is better?

almost...depressing

I would go straight there. It is a depressing horrible cover. The UK one while being a sort of visual riot - does look fun.

Maybe the designer of the US cover mainly listens to music like shoegaze or drone metal.

Mediocre book design is becoming commodotized. I have recently seen a number of books by a reputable academic press: they were all designed by a company in India, using TNR and TNR bold as the main design elements. The pages weren't ugly, but they were definitely underwhelming.

I just recently heard, that book covers often are designed long before the rest of the book is layed out, since the covers are used by the publishers to promote their book to bookshops for pre-order. So the idea that cover design and layout of the book were done by two different designers who had no idea how the respective other part would look, –while not being an excuse for bad design– might not be so impossible...

In the old days, designers actually read the books to know what they were dealing with.

ChrisL

“ E n d l e s s l y   S t i m u l a t i n g.  ”

I'm not going to judge **** relations this Sunday morning because I've sinned many times in the name of expedient productivity. But the letter spacing between the period and the closing quotation mark makes me think the designer doesn't wipe after a poo either.

(I saw in the preview that **** was censored by the system. It's a word for relations between humans and beasts. Admins please remove this explanation if censored word is cleared/edited.)

My inner curmudgeon asks: Are books these days designed by people who don't read? There seems to be an increasing disconnect between making things and actually using them. Like Christmas decorations made in China.

That cover is truly appalling. It seems like object was nothing more than "find a stock photo with blurry music notes with the blurry bit where the title would go". In a book store, I'd pick it up just to see how bad the rest of the book is.

-=®=-

And the title page seems to have no relation to either the (depressing) cover or the (crowded) interior text. I wonder if three "designers" were involved ...

Most trade publishers have completely separate departments to design the cover and the interior of the book. It's one reason I like to design illustrated books - I control every aspect of the book's design from typography to head and tail bands.

Here's an illuminating story - I was hired to design the interior only of a trade cookbook. I asked to see the cover so I could try to match the type. They told me it wasn't necessary for them to match, so I did a sample design on my own. Then they came back to me and said yes, why not try to match the cover. They sent me the cover design. It was hideous, but I was able to patch together something passable using the fonts they'd used (fonts I would never have chosen on my own). When I got the final book, they had changed the cover completely. The new cover was equally awful and I had done an interior I didn't like to match an ugly cover that never got used.

As Claas said, the cover is considered (in trade publishing) a marketing tool, and subject to much more scrutiny than the interior of the book. It is often done way in advance and can change a lot. Trade book interiors are basically churned out. That said, there is no excuse for bad typography. I just read a book set entirely in Rotis. It was pretty painful.

I prefer the UK version as well - at least it's trying to say something.

I just read a book set entirely in Rotis. It was pretty painful.

My boss recently asked me to help him design a 200+ page book set completely in 10/14 Helvetica Neue overlaid on images. I haven’t been back to the office in a while…

On the margin, I just watched this 100 minute video on book and book cover design featuring Glaser, Kidd, and Eggers...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpVQRKyD_yM&eurl=http://blog.92y.org/inde...

I agree, the UK's splash kitch version is in contrast to the US's moody broody version. But if both designs are so horrid, why then is the book a best seller?

Computers - faster, cheaper and more reliable
Mac OS - "best ever"
InDesign - makes quality typography easy
Photoshop - missing a glyph palette but apart from that rock solid
fonts - more features, more styles, more weights, more characters
Graphic design graduates - more than ever

So how does this square with the falling standards of book typography?

"why then is the book a best seller?"

Because so many books are badly designed that nobody pays a hoot of attention to cover design anymore. They buy books on what reviewers have said or what their friends have said or what Oprah has said.

ChrisL

One book?

So how does this square with the falling standards of book typography?

It doesn’t and that’s the part that seems to piss so many people off. I think the poor design of mass-market books is particularly glaring because at a time when so much effort and money are poured into designing really complicated stuff—often just to make it seem simple!—something as simple as books is often ignored. Why aren’t the interiors of mass market books treated with the same simple, elegant design systems that publishers manage to put into every cheap collection of classics, or series of crap video game tie-in sci-fi stories? Wouldn’t it cost less?

I think most people are basically inured to ugliness. Why is so much contemporary architecture tasteless and hideous? I'm not talking about Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, but your basic home, office complex, mall. We have the technology surely to make them look halfway decent. Look at warehouses or industrial buildings constructed early last century, they have interesting surface detail - you almost never see that nowadays. Or take your average chain restaurant - boring furniture and generic lighting. And let's not even talk about the menu design.

I think in general people don't really care how things look, and as long as ugly books continue to sell the publishers won't care much either.

David I like your new icon. It's a bit more gussied up now - but in quite a pleasant way. It reminds me of a satsuma wrapper. Or a furoshiki.

as ugly books continue to sell

The thing is publishers will say the reason they are ugly is that books don't sell enough so they have to cheap/careless to turn a profit etc etc. I am sure you are far more familiar with that line of reasoning and the details. When an entity is used to doing something a certain way, they will defend doing it that way if they have high or low profits. Either can be used as an excuse. Which is what is is.

"The book is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, and made the New York Times Bestseller list"

I absolute agree it does not look good. The thing is, sometimes some stuff get printed...Probably the author did not realized, but saved a few bucks and designed it himself?

The cover doesn't emphasize the word Music, but the title page does...

The New York Times Bestseller List is a horrible litmus test for literary merit. Simply because a lot of people buy a particular book bears little indication of it's quality. Once in a while, truly good literature ends up on the list, but usually it's Dan Brown or James Patterson. That being said, it's little wonder why the typography is lackluster, if not terrible.

The books on the NY Times list are always from major corporate publishers—Harper-Collins, Houghton-Mifflin, etc. Conversely from Britain, i.e., where for a long while, publishers were regarded the standard-bearers of a literary tradition steeped in timeless mastery of the written language, US publishers seem to consider themselves not unlike any other manufacturer of consumer products. The care and artistry once put into producing books (ironically enough, at a time when the process was far more labour-intensive, and required far greater skill) are now but vestiges, on occasion loosely mimicked in contemporary design, ultimately mocking the technological advances which, by all accounts, should in turn have advanced the craft.

This has become the norm because the people in decision-making capacities at these publishing houses are MBAs, not literati (to say nothing of designers or typographers). Of concern to these people are movie-rights and marketing—the literary value (much less the design quality) of the books is almost negligible. i'm certain i'm not the only one here who's had the awkward experience of trying to convince a client to spend an extra hundred bucks or so on a typeface, or a few more hours to lay out a book correctly. i'm convinced that desktop-publishing has caused people to consider speed an ample substitute for quality (or that the two are equally interchangeable). Furthermore, nobody in design school ever seemed to care about traditional typography...everyone was attracted to the edgy, David Carson stuff. Don't get me wrong...i delight in breaking the rules as much as anyone—particularly when the project is gagging for it—but anymore, i notice that when people pick up a book that doesn't look like it was printed straight from Microsoft Word, they definitely take notice—usually, they say, "It looks old!" The problem with corporate, MBA types is that—in my experience—they can't tell the difference, even if it was in fact printed directly from Word. Though i'm tempted to digress—into what large-scale failures in education, or the modern propensity to study only the discipline in which one intends to make a living, willfully neglecting all other aspects of culture and knowledge, and how these relate to the current hideousness of printed —i'll spare you my further waxing philosophical.

The thing is though, that there are LOTS of beautifully designed books out there. Just not this one. But walk into any bookstore, especially in the Fiction department and you will see some remarkable designs. (Open the books and it's a crap shoot).

Yes, there are many well-designed books.
But the issue may be considered the Bringhurst Irony: that the main style guide of professional typography does not, for various reasons, connect with the major constituency it addresses, ordinary books--of which This is Your Brain on Music is assumed to be representative.

Commodification might not be such a bad thing, if it means better templates which default to fonts with the features (old style figures and small caps) that are good for book text.

I agree that this book is terrible in every aspect but its awfulness is completely standard. It doesn't matter whether it is Britain, the U.S. or Australia, book design is at a terrible low: a combination of economics, trash imitates trash, and a disconnect between design and function. With many paperbacks produced by simply photo-reducing the hardcover design and printing it on rougher paper, the result is often actually unreadable. At least in Nick's example the book can be read; certainly that is not always the case. People complain that the young don't read enough: we should try to make books that can be read. (Thank God for Knopf — the exception to the rule!)

The very same complaints could be made about the music industry. The trash-imitates-trash aesthetic rules there as well.

In the end it's stupid: you sell less, and because you destroy the consumer's confidence, everyone sells less in a downward spiral.

I think Patty gives good insight into the failed process. The business model of publishing is a bit of a wreck and the books themselves are not even a tertiary priority in many cases.

So many editors and designers now have no office, and the imprints are bought and sold multiple times during the development of any given book. It is often the case that managers don't keep up with who is on the payroll and what they are doing. People are taken on and off projects to manipulate the quarterly stock results in anticipation of another buy out. It is considered that simply having "product" in the ”pipeline" is enough on paper to make the company appear legit.

Maybe it is like cars in the '70s—quality will hit a low point and then slowly return to some smarter, faster more efficient model that doesn't match what was but is better than what is. I would be happy if there was some sense that a cover should relate to the interior, and that communication between the crafts people making a book was worth fostering.

«I’m curious, other than the legibility of the light, reversed type (which is certainly no minor thing when you’re talking about a book cover, I agree), is there anything else about the US cover you think is better?»

That was the main thing, as well as relevance. Generic thoug the US stock photo sheet music may be, it’s immediately relevant to the title of the book.

The UK cover doesn’t even have that. It’s got flowers (overused and completely irrelevant), pink-red-orange-yellowish splash patterns (look nice, but completely irrelevant), and a semi-hard-to-make-out human head (semi-relevant to the ‘brain’ part of the title, though not directly so).

I agree the UK cover gives off a much better immediate impression, and it’s much more likely to catch someone’s eye sitting on a book shelf (the book, not the eye); but if you look at the details, the design says next to nothing about the book, or at least its title. Dreary and shoddy though the US cover may be (okay, is), it at least gives an immediate link between design and book title, and doesn’t have any real design hara-kiris like the small-white-on-bright-orange text of the UK cover.

In truth, you can blame marketing for ugly book covers - they really can be "design by committee" but there is no excuse for poorly typeset book interiors. There are people for whom that is a profession (which seems to me incredibly boring) and they really should know their trade.

Not to sound unduly xenophobic, but it's going to be terrible when in a few years' time there are no stateside book design and comp jobs. And in a Twilight Zone–esque turn of irony, I won't even be able to enjoy my unemployment because all the books I could be reading are set so poorly.

There are people for whom that is a profession (which seems to me incredibly boring)

Ehhh ... it can be. But so can be branding cows, or whaling whales. Or designing graphics.

and they really should know their trade.

The little pride I've left (after >20 yrs in typesetting) comes from creating nearly invisible work -- "invisible" in the sense of people not noticing it's "bad", as opposed to the original example.

I find myself in the book stores more and more rejecting books based on their looks. Next thing, I'll probably scoff'em when there aren't any "Th" ligatures in them. When it's all so easy!

In truth, you can blame marketing for ugly book covers

GRRR marketing!!!! What is it with those people?

... and they really should know their trade

B b but, Trades people are so expensive, and no one has, as yet, been physically injured by a lousy book design (paper cuts aside) , and little or no property damage results from bad typography, so where's the incentive to hire someone who knows or cares about the trade? The connection between a badly designed book and poor sales hasn't been clearly demonstrated... Or, maybe it has but not in a way that an MBA or marketing professional can understand.

I think it was in the 30's when designers like Raymond Lowry convincingly demonstrated that well designed, attractive products sold better than poorly designed, ugly ones. Big news in tough economic times, I guess. One would think that this is self-evident and having been proven over and over again in the market place, that that would be the end of it: (Very easy and self evident) lesson learned; "Hey! Let's not make ugly crap."... But, it's not been learned. People don't receive much, if any training in design appreciation, aesthetics or what ever you want to call it. They don't have the understanding or confidence to comment one way or the other about a design. Design is still dismissed as styling and an unnecessary frill - which tended to be what industrial design amounted to before designers like Lowry.

So, here we are in tough economic times. Tougher than most for the book publishing industry. Like in the movies, when the going get's tough, you can count on folks to do all the wrong things much more vigorously than they they would otherwise.

-=®=-

> I just recently heard, that book covers often are designed long before the rest of the book is layed out, since the covers are used by the publishers to promote their book to bookshops for pre-order.

Yep, that's true. I usually have to design covers long before I even start with the inside of the book (or seen any text even).
Luckily I usually get the chance to change the design of the cover a little bit, once I have the inside layed out, so that the inside and outside of the book match better together.

I sometimes think we who design things can be hyper-sensitive to design. I hope I never don't read a book because it has a lousy jacket design or lousy text typography. I read books because I want to know what is in them or to be entertained by them, not in order to appreciate or condemn their design. I am not a typographer 24/7/365. If I want author X's take on event Y, this is the only way I'm going to get it (in printed form).

But Nick's questions are good ones, and colleagues in the book racket have addressed most of the causes of this design dis-connect above; so I need not belabor them. But, as a staff design & production manager, I have to admit some complicity in this. At times I have to get a book jacket designed for publicity use before the author is even finished writing. I may end up sending the jacket design to a designer who is not suited to design the text, but I don't know that on that date. & then design for the jacket may not have many "adaptable" elements a text designer can pick up on.

This is not an ideal situation, I agree. But I also agree that the incidence of damage from bad book design is much lower than from, say, bad can opener design. I hope that until I go blind I shall never give up reading, regardless of the lousy design work I may have to plow through.

Now bad printing, that really irks me. Bad printing can sabotage a good design. But I doubt I'd not read a book that was badly printed, either. Right now I'm reading the Penguin paper edition of Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians." Mediocre design, terrible printing, but I'm still reading.

As to Nick's other comment about "ordinary books": evidence is that designers of "ordinary books" do not read Bringhurst, nor Rich Hendel's "On Book Design." Missing ligatures, false smalls, lining figs, bad margins: they all attest to this.

Do not look to any publication's list of best books for any hope of finding well-designed books. Only rarely do reviewers have any awareness of book design. Even for those who may feel we are living in an era when more attention is paid to design, I think it is too much to expect book reviewers to chat about design.

That's the view from here, today. From a guy who has spent 40 years trying to make books look good—and at times succeeding, I think.

powers

I hope I never don’t read a book because it has a lousy jacket design or lousy text typography.

No, but I have read (or at least picked up in the store) books that have really nice jacket designs.

It looks like Mr Rand had something to say on respect of this design bureaucracy

The politics of design

Héctor

The inside layout of Your Brain on Music does look good at first glance, in the sense that it is contemporary.
And there has been attention paid to typographic details--the running heads are set in Helvetica 35, tracked out slightly, providing a nice contrast with the main text. The book is well written, well edited, and well printed.

If the leading had been reduced, and horizontal scaling of 95% applied, to increase the bottom and outside margins, for more comfort in holding the book during reading, it would perhaps have looked "old". So that is the penalty we pay, for living in an era when mere functionality appears to be behind the times.

>>> No, but I have read (or at least picked up in the store) books that have really nice jacket designs.

Then those were successful jackets. They accomplished the first goal of a book jacket: to get someone to pick up the book. The second goal may be to actually convey some meaningful info about the book, by both visuals and text. Those you read accomplished the third goal: to get someone to read the book. Actually, maybe the third goal is to get someone to buy the book. Getting someone to read the thing may be immaterial.

One other thing about book jackets and covers, apart from the design of the billboard (I mean the front of the jacket). The type for flaps and for the descriptive copy and blurbs on the back is often atrocious. These parts of the jackets should be put together by typographers, working in cohort with the graphic designers who did the fronts. Type on jacket and cover backs is full of false italics, poorly placed blurb attributions, and generally poor, unimaginative typography. & there seems no attention paid to flap copy. Drop it in, set it FL/RR with no attention to the rag, and punch out for the day. The narrow measure of the flap seems to be too much of a challenge for many designers.

powers

I do both book covers and interiors, and I always finish the interior before I ever start on the cover. I guess it's just an old habit of mine.

> I do both book covers and interiors, and I always finish the interior before I ever start on the cover. I guess it’s just an old habit of mine.

That is ideal. However, most publishers want to use the cover in his promotional material even before the book is finished. I guess you're lucky, then. :)

I wish I could design the cover after the interior as well. I designed the cover for the book I'm doing the interior for right now something like 5 weeks ago. Really annoying.

I usually have to get the cover well under way before the interior, as the catalog deadline usually comes up first. The cover can change, but ideally it doesn't.

The example is extra-ugly-disfunctional!
However, if i compare my impressions over 5-10 years in the field of "mainstream" fictional literature and not only, i think it's getting better (not worse), at least here in germany. Better margins, better typefaces in use, better textsetting (by the use of better software).

Interesting Poms. Could you post a pic of a typical German work of fiction, by any chance?

When I was creative director at a small publisher, it was not unusual to need the cover as much as six months before the interior was set to go to design. Hell, sometimes the title wasn't even finalized before we needed tight comps for sales conference. (Catalog date was the deadline for finalizing titles, and it was not uncommon to have to rework a cover or two the night before.) Manuscript wasn't often available, so any brief came from an outline or a marketing blurb. I usually had the luxury of sitting down with the editorial director and the acquiring editor for an in-depth conversation about the book -- much better than talking to marketing alone.

Covers are always caught in a tug-of-war between Editorial and Marketing. It has to be accurate enough to adequately reflect the editorial tone and content; it has to be sexy enough to satisfy marketing. These are often two competing concerns. Left entirely to Editorial, a book cover would reflect and describe the content completely accurately, and be totally boring. Left entirely to Marketing, a book cover would be flashy, look like the best-selling competition (only different), consist primarily of the current colour-du-jour, be full of buzz words, and have very little to do with the topic.

For most of our titles, it was neither practical nor always the best course to have the same designer do both the interior and cover. Different skills and strengths are needed. Navigating the ins and outs of feedback from marketing and understanding the marketplace and trends for covers is a different skill set from managing complex hierarchies of textual structure, illustrations, charts, tables, etc., and responding to editorial needs and input. Not a lot of designers can do both equally well.

I felt it was my job to try to keep the outside and inside harmonious through my direction, to the extent that I could under the other inevitable constraints and challenges. The title page was one place I often stepped in directly to design a transition from outside to inside. Also, back cover and flaps were another area where a little coordination could help bridge the gap.

-- K.

Kent,
Nicely said and informative anecdote! I can even feel your pain between the lines!

ChrisL

>No, but I have read (or at least picked up in the store) books that have really nice jacket designs.

As a writer, let me put in a word for the value of good interior design. Once the title and jacket design or the name of the author get you to pick up the book, then you look inside. If this is visually inviting and easily readable, you are more likely to sample it extensively. And then, if you like the content, buy the book.

I think it is something like wearing flattering, suitable clothes. It isn't going to make an ugly person beautiful, but it will help soften the blow, and will make the beautiful person glorious.

Here analogy to 'beauty' is what the writer wrote. Good interior design won't make a bad book good, but it will make a good book more inviting to read.

If the book is a non-fiction one where structuring information is important to usability of the book, like a cook book or text book, or--for different reasons--art book, then visual presentation actually becomes part of content quality.

What Tschichold had to say:

The dust jacket […] is not an actual part of the book. Hence, its design must not be mentioned inside of the book, just as little as a poster that has been made for the book. Yet, it shall be designed to be in line with the book and the cover, regarding style and colour. It is a poster and thus should have an effect from afar. From its execution, we can read the audience’s level of education, or what opinion the publisher has on the consumers of his books. Jackets should be made of a not too durable paper, so that they have to go the wastebasket as soon as possible. They are to be regarded as packaging and do not belong to book arts, but to advertising.

[Roughly translated from Buchherstellung als kunst, in: Schriften 1925–1974, Vol. 2]

Florian, that is fabulous. Bring back the days of black leather covers with studs and straps!

Reading these posts I find most of you have much more respect for Marketing than I. It is probably a symptom of working in college textbook publishing where the best sales people were given marketing positions as a reward.

I was wondering what the experts here think of the design of the Everyman's Library (produced by a division of Random House, I believe). I think that the books are beautifully made and designed (and each one includes a blurb at the back about the typeface used). It's good to be able to buy the classics in such nice editions.

Mark -- I don't know if I would say that I have inordinate "respect" for Marketing, per se; at least not to the extent that I interpret your comment to mean that I think they always make good decisions.

It's more the case that, at least in the organization I was a part of, Marketing was given a majority stake in approving covers. Essentially, they were the client for the design. If the marketing director wasn't satisfied, then the publisher wouldn't accept it. I could not make unilateral decisions.

The argument goes something like this: The cover is a critical factor in their ability to make the sales to the trade buyers. And since their success is riding on it, they need significant input and review. If they can't have some control over the cover, then how can they be accountable for sales success or failure. Such is the nature of the business.

I don't mean to pass the buck. My opinion certainly counted for a lot; I couldn't have done my job if I didn't have a lot of influence and wasn't able to articulate the intent and how the cover served the marketing objectives, etc.. But mine was not always the final decision. It was usually a negotiation between myself, the publisher, the marketing director, and the editorial director. I represented design (and good taste ;-); the editorial director represented the acquiring editor and the author; the marketing director represented his team's opinions and the feedback from buyers.

I worked with a good team and I did have respect for the individuals. I think we we were generally in accord. Often I could prevail with persuasive arguments and force of my convictions. Sometimes the editorial director would veto something that was clearly not going to set the right expectation for how the actual book that was shaping up in manuscript. Sometimes the marketing director would come back with input from a huge potential buyer.

I'll tell you, if the Barnes & Noble buyer said, "That's not the final cover, is it?" then you knew it wasn't. ;-)

That Tschichold quote is a good one. Dwiggins had a similar opinion. Covers and jackets are essentially advertising, not book design. Of course, things are a little different now than they were then, in terms of how the market works and what book consumers look for. The advent of the paperback had a huge impact on that.

-- K.

I’ve actually always thought it would be nice to work with marketing people that had the budget and real numbers skills required to add helpful information to the process.

Mark, like Kent I can't say I have much (or any) respect for marketing. But I had to work with them. As Art Director it was often my job to translate their crappy ideas into feedback that actually made sense for the designers AND produced decent looking books.

The frustrating thing was... I didn't tell them how to sell books but they thought they could tell me how to design.

The classic Penguin paperback covers involved no razzmatazz relative to the book’s content, yet I’d be delighted if my books were published in that spare, elegant, distinctive style of jacket.

...hey thought they could tell me how to design.

For some reason designing is like driving, cooking, et al., in that it's an activity that most people believe they're better-than-average at. Which is, by definition, impossible.

@akma: There are a lot of books published in that style, but they’re usually books sold to students and serious readers who don’t give a damn about the cover one way or another. But those covers probably won’t do a lot for sales of books that need to sell themselves to people browsing a bookshop for something interesting.

But again, I don’t understand why they can’t just have good standards for all interiors and leave the wacky stuff to the covers!

 Part of the problem is, I’d guess, that default settings in various programs are just so… blah. Start typing up a book chapter in Word or Open​Office.org: how hard is it to get a decent page spread? And it’s only the most recent version of Word that can deal with OpenType fonts well (or so I’m told, though when I used the trial version I couldn’t tell if I got real or fake small caps). Graphic-design professionals have had all those tools, but who hires them for the inside of a book? It’s not as if you need to pay for typesetting anymore, right?
 Tools built on Knuth’s Τεχ exist, but are almost unknown outside the math & computer science fields—and besides, I’ve read comments here suggesting that the default fonts & layouts are mediocre.
 What’s needed is a set of sensible defaults, freely available, for the common uses. Decent page spreads for 8½″×11″ and 6″×9″ and whatever the blazes dimensions pocket paperbacks are. Nothing spectacular—if someone wants spectacular they can hire one of you—but something usable, a default "house style" for houses that lack one.
 (Granted, some people will see "all that wasted space" on the page and try the old ¼″ margins, but they'll first have seen a print-out of the "right way" and might—just might—notice how it looks better.)
—Joel

The TeX defaults are designed so that mathematicians and computer scientists can make not-terrible, unremarkable journal articles and technical books with a minimum of fuss, rather like a very basic web page can be made without incredibly deep knowledge of HTML. Very nice work can be done with it, but it requires learning more about the system than some regular users would like.

Newer versions of TeX allow use of OpenType fonts (I set a parish history book in Garamond Premier Pro, for example) but amateurs like me can still make the same bad font choices as we could in Word.

I used to belong to the Folio Society and they seemed to care about all aspects of the appearance and production of their books. I just went and checked one, and noted that they were careful to describe not only the typeface, but the kind of paper used, and the binding, and the cover materials, and so forth.

Jim Tubman
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

"What’s needed is a set of sensible defaults, freely available, for the common uses."

I agree completely, there's just this one 'little' problem — what sensible default? Language, point size, line length, application and typeface variables produce a combinatorial explosion of possible 'defaults' that make the definition of 'common uses' nearly impossible to corral into a 'common user's' defaults.

But I have a plan!

Cheers!

JCSalomon -

Most publishers won't accept books designed in Word or Office - standard is to use Quark or InDesign. Presumably the people versed in those softwares have at least a rudimentary sense of design.

"But I have a plan!"

David,
Would it be possible to create Opentype stylistic sets that would reduce the number of problematic variables and then recomend style sheets for page-makeup apps that resolve most other issues?

ChrisL

I wonder if David's "plan" is similar to the plan once hatched by a composition house I worked with. They came up with the notion that one could devise a set of style sheets for Quark or InDesign that could cover "all possible needs" for various classes of books.
Their idea was to reduce the number of faces they would have available to clients, and they would attempt to use types that were "fairly enough close" to one another that they could all use the same style sheets. Through coding the books would be styled almost on the fly and compoisition time reduced. & would I do this for them.

Ha! I walked away from that as quickly as I could.

powers

Powers example takes the cake. I agree that the problem is the belief by people in administrative positions that the compositor has but to "import the word file into InDesign" and then send it to the printer. Without his large expensive machine, the compositor becomes a software "operator"; that means the software is seen as almost magical and the compositor looks like any other cubicle dweller. And the designer is usually in no position to "educate" said administrator about the complexities of design. (/end intentional exaggeration)

In response, designers & compositors might offer two choices: the commodified preset template, with set dimensions and stylesheets and no tweaking, or a custom design based on the content of the book. People love choice and this simultaneously gives them that (and the concomitant graduated price scale), as well as an education about the work and experience that goes into intelligent book design. Then there are questions of design exclusivity, and what to do when the customer says, "I'll take template A, but with Palatino instead of Times." ... anyways, my $.02

"...reduce the number of faces..." ya! that's me. Do I look like an i phone? The president of Adobe? Bill Hill? :)

The problem is not the number of faces. There are three layers of anti-typographic technology layered on the problem. Layer one is the unfortunate one-size-fits all outline, because discrete outlines are trying to solve an indiscrete problem. Layer two is formats only allowing one numerical relationship of bounds-to-'em", (per application;)). The third layer is the monumentally stupid, so far, after 14 years, OpenType, that must be beaten into looking more than a character ahead.

The barrier that this third layer comes up against is named, for the purposes of this discussion, Greg Hitchcock. Greg always asks at this point, "How long are you willing to wait for the typography, of a paragraph?" My suspicion is, that we are talkin' about 5 seconds or so, but the answer is never forthcoming, much less 'fifthcoming'. If 5 seconds is a long time relative to today's user then maybe they should not be composing books, but relative to the amount of time a typographer might work over a paragraph, 5 seconds is nothing.

So, the question for ya'all, is how long are you willing to wait for the idealization, based on the factors we all know are important to good book composition, of any paragraph of any book type?

Cheers!

David, could you explain further the problems with layer one, the outline layer? Are you referring to the lack of optical scaling here, or something other stuff? What?

Patricia:
 As I understand Nick's thesis here, the folks using whatever software they have for book publishing are not displaying that "rudimentary sense of design" you think they ought to.
—Joel

Concerning the original post:
I wouldn't use old-style numerals here. As these are followed by Hz, the content of the very number it technical. Of course, proportional, rather than tabular lining numbers would have been nice (and equally a non-breaking space [or preferable thin space] between no's and "Hz").

Si:
Computers - faster, cheaper and more reliable
Mac OS - “best ever”
InDesign - makes quality typography easy
Photoshop - missing a glyph palette but apart from that rock solid
fonts - more features, more styles, more weights, more characters
Graphic design graduates - more than ever

So how does this square with the falling standards of book typography?

Very easy: all these contribute to the actual downfall of book typography.
cheap computers => everyone can have a computer.
Everyone having a computer can have InDesign and feel like a designer, and they do act as such, even though they are not.
InDesign makes quality typo easy, but you have to know what good typo is, then you can achieve it easily.

More than ever graphic design students? More => inflation => less paid => less incentive to perform quality work.

Also, generally, more students means a broader range from very good (and very expensive) to very poor (and very cheap).
Nowadays publishers can hire a very bad designer (and save a lot of money), and still have good conscience (I have hired a learn, professional designer, after all, with a diploma and stuff...)

Whatever.

What’s needed is a set of sensible defaults, freely available, for the common uses. Decent page spreads for 8½″×11″ and 6″×9″ and whatever the blazes dimensions pocket paperbacks are. Nothing spectacular—if someone wants spectacular they can hire one of you—but something usable, a default “house style” for houses that lack one.

I don't think this would solve the general problem of poor book design, but it would break down one of the barriers that make word-processing page design unnecessarily hard. Although word processing apps add more and more "page design" features, they tend to pay little or no attention to making attractive pages of running copy.

Although word processing apps add more and more “page design” features, they tend to pay little or no attention to making attractive pages of running copy.

Nor should they. Word processing apps are writing tools. It’s not Microsoft’s fault that the world is full of idiots who typeset entire books with Word.

so many good book covers designers out there:

http://covers.fwis.com/

so... why?

dr

Two very interesting aspects:

D.B. -- There are three layers of anti-typographic technology layered on the problem. Layer one is the unfortunate one-size-fits all outline, because discrete outlines are trying to solve an indiscrete problem. Layer two is formats only allowing one numerical relationship of bounds-to-'em', (per application;)). The third layer is the monumentally stupid, so far, after 14 years, OpenType, that must be beaten into looking more than a character ahead.

I agree with #1.
Don't understand #2.
And agree with #3, provided my understanding is correct. Do you mean: Still trying to make (at least CFF) OTFs compatible with oldest PST1 specs? The need to provide cmap tables with more information than a simple Unicode-GID mapping, to please OSes and apps that still don't support Unicode (de)composition & OT layout features? Depending on the former, the impossibility to make really 'smart' fonts that provide base letters + mark feature (that could be pretty small fonts again)? Not to mention: All the duplicate and superfluous information accumulated in tables, nice for font technology archaeologiest but a hassle for type designers? In short, the attempt to achieve backward-compatibility whatever it costs, without achieving it anyway?

akma -- Although word processing apps add more and more "page design" features, they tend to pay little or no attention to making attractive pages of running copy.
J.P. -- Nor should they. Word processing apps are writing tools. It’s not Microsoft’s fault that the world is full of idiots who typeset entire books with Word.

Of course it is. Word is not a word processor but a layout application. Word's functions almost force users to design since it offers Bold and Italic buttons and paragraph styles that mimick layout applications' functionality. A word processor would force users to write texts and structure these -- nothing more. (I'd also add images. I think todays' needs tend towards organizing data, with bits of texts, images, movies, sound bits. The fundamental question is: How do we write? Not: What should the printout look like?) But despite we have long entered an information age which keeps certain people busy lecturing about, the major companies still haven't recognized that content and presentation of content are two distinct pairs of shoes. Which should be reflected in the tools they produce. End of rant.  :D
To make sure this doesn't look too much like an anti-Word campaign, I should say that I remember a book typeset in Word, as nicely set as most InDesign users would do it.

Karsten

why?

Because somebody thought that cover Nick posted WAS good. The designer and the publisher obviously liked it or it never would have made it to print.

The problem of the tiny margins in Your Brain on Music is, I suspect, caused by reusing the hardcover layout at a smaller size for the paperback edition.
That wouldn't be the designer's responsibility, but as Patty says, someone makes the decisions, and it was OKed to trim smaller and not revise the artwork--someone who didn't treat Bringhurst 8.5.1 as gospel.

I sympathize, because my eyes glazed over as I started to read his mathematical dissertation on the golden mean, and have never read that section of the The Elements. The only reason I am able to quote the reference is because I went looking for it to mention in this thread.

Word is not a word processor but a layout application. Word’s functions almost force users to design since it offers Bold and Italic buttons and paragraph styles that mimick layout applications’ functionality.

Very true!

I remember a book typeset in Word, as nicely set as most InDesign users would do it.

A one-off, eh?
The truth is -- it has been mentioned before --, using ID doth not a nice book make.
People proudly present us with their ghastly homegrown ID docs for printing, sometimes created in beta versions. Biggest laugh was when someone gave us his Book document solus on a diskette. Oh yeah, he was really impressed by the compression rate.

"Don’t understand #2."
Well, think about the fact that each typeface design has a range of ideal leading for a given size and line length in use for a particular language (remembering, that the tallest and lowest glyph, the font's vertical bounding box, changes from one language to another). Imagine you have this ideal composition, in English, and then, someone says, "we need to set this same text in all caps." I know, far-fetched, but what happens is that the entire descent in the absence of the l.c., except for perhaps Q and J, is now part of the leading, which is no longer ideal. Or think of changing from English to Swedish.

"And agree with #3[...] Do you mean: Still trying to make (at least CFF) OTFs compatible with oldest PST1 specs?"
That too... "Typography" does not exactly thrive on substitution based just on simple adjacency. The first and last characters, in documents, stories, paragraphs, lines and words as well as mid-word, like the breaks in compound words, hyphenated words and between syllables, all have to work together to achieve it. I saw, for example, a MS document touting OT features, where every single ct and st combination, in the whole 'story' were....I can't bring myself to say it, sorry.

I'll get back to describe more about #1 soon.

Cheers

The problem of the tiny margins in Your Brain on Music is, I suspect, caused by reusing the hardcover layout at a smaller size for the paperback edition.

Or just someone trying to save paper and thus money. If you think those margins are bad, take a look at the margins on British pulp sci-fi!

…my eyes glazed over as I started to read his mathematical dissertation on the golden mean, and have never read that section of the The Elements.

I often find myself wondering about the sanity of phi devotees. But it must be true, because if one scours all of Europe there are at least a dozen old buildings and paintings that sort of match up to it!

There was an article in a mathematical magazine a few years ago arguing that the aesthetic dimension of the golden mean is bollocks. It simply isn't notably attractive to us. (It was in the American Mathematical Monthly.) Of course that is not to deny that the Fibonacci sequence and its frequent appearance in nature is bollocks too. That is well attested.

Yet some of that ”god’s geometry” jazz is a bit forced as well. Like most magical thinking you can use it if it helps.

David, thanks for explaining #2. I am keen to hear more about #1 Did Karsten have your thinking in #3?

Eluard, could you give us some links on how the golden mean and Fibonacci sequence are overrated?

Levitin notes that while particular pitches trigger response in particular areas of the brain, there is as yet no neuro-biological explanation of how pitch relations, such as a major third, are perceived.

Visual perception is nowhere near as amenable to scientific analysis as sound, but I would imagine that certain proportions are more noticeable and attractive, as in music.

Certainly William, here is the link (last night when I posted — it was very late — I blanked on Devlin's name otherwise I would have posted it then.)

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_06_04.html

There is a follow up article in the same place, that you might also check out.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_05_07.html

Thanks, Eluard. The last sentences in your above post are misleading, as they seem to assert that the the golden ratio and fibonacci series are not important in nature. I see from the article that you meant to say that they are indeed important in nature. Sentences with double negatives are in general not a good idea, as they are confusing!

It seems that aesthetic claims are exaggerated. Still I personally think they can't be dismissed as total rubbish. I forget where I read it, but in the average man the ratio from belly button to floor to overall height is near the golden ratio. However in an average woman this ration is farther from the golden ratio, as women's legs are on average shorter in relation to the torso. This would explain the persistence of high heals, in spite of their extreme discomfort. With high heals, the average woman's proportions when standing look more elegant, particularly with clothing cinched in at the waist.

There are better and worse proportions, but what looks good is so influenced by other proportions in an object that nobody really has understood mathematically what makes some work well in what situations.

Rudolf Rudovsky used to ask, How do you expect to have great architecture when you wear such terrible clothes?

John, do you have any documentation for that? I'd love to use it elsewhere. (PS -- how's SBL Greek coming?)

«Sentences with double negatives are in general not a good idea, as they are confusing!»

There was no double negative in that sentence.

Writing ‘deny’ when you mean ‘imply’ doesn’t normally aid comprehension much either, though. ;-)