Notes on Typography & Publishing

I happened the other day to be working on a book. Not a visual one, its contents do not matter to us here. It happened that I was designing a title page, something simple and foresquare. A bit like this one:

and I thought well that's very nice, quite the look I was going for of course. But then I spent some time with a book on design, and decided to try making the more important words larger. So the next iteration looks like this:

which is better, I think. At this point we're enforcing a kind of cadence to the way we say it. It's the CAT who is wearing a HAT. Not, for instance, a cat who IS WEARING a hat. Be that as it may, let us stick to this. It looks a bit cramped though, don't you think? Let's open it up a trifle.

That's quite nice. Vertical spacing is a bit ragged, though, don't you think? What we really want, I think, is some sort of fixed spacing.

Ah, that's what we're looking for.

Okay, you're probably thinking holy cow, what a dweeb, who cares about this sort of thing?

Well, the thing is, somebody's got to decide this stuff. Sometimes when I look at an object, like an automobile, it hits me that every little bit on there was thought up by someone, specified to the ten-thousandth inch. Someone drew a picture of that fiddly little bit of trim that doesn't do a thing but dress up the handle, someone selected a material to make it out of, and wrote up a procedure for installing it, and so on. Hours of work, dozens of choices, for a bit that does not consciously register but which when well done absolutely affects the way you perceive the car. Each little bit partakes of and contributes to the car's design language.

Books likewise.

When you do a book, someone is going to select a font for the title, they're going to select a weight, a size, and they're going to place it on the page. You can do these things badly, or you can do them well. You can, at least, think about them a little bit. There are five elements on this extremely simple title page. Three text items, and two horizontal rules. I thought about all of them. I placed and sized them with at least a little care. I'd probably tinker with the vertical spacing of elements on the page if I kept at it, but I was focused on getting the title right.

This, fundamentally, is why you need to do your own books. You have to take some time to decide these things, to think about how each trivial detail is going to interact with the whole, to create an overall impression.

With what cadence do you read your title? Which words should be bigger, and which smaller?

If you don't have at least some rough grasp of at least some of this material, when Steidl, or MACK, or Phaidon come around with a contract, you're going to end up not doing a book at all. Someone else is going to do the book, using your pictures.

Further, if you are aware of these details, you can go examine the house styles with a more skilled eye. MACK, for instance, favors a very specific set of design tropes, which extend to text. Very skinny outer margins with enormous gutters. Frontmatter as often as not is just a single word or two per page, often printed very light, often placed near an outer margin. There's a very specific look going on here, and it if doesn't suit your vision, your pictures, you don't want to get a deal from MACK.

It's likely that MACK also doesn't want to do a deal with you, but if you do somehow get together and you don't like the house style (or it doesn't suit the project) you're going to end up sad, or compromised.

Self publishing a book, and doing the design yourself, is going to force you through all these choices. It's all on you. It doesn't matter if the results are shit, the point is that you have done it. You know, albeit slightly, what the issues are, what choices need to be made. You will, if you're paying attention, have developed some ideas and opinions on all this ancillary stuff.

You are now smarter and wiser. Whether publishers will like you better or not at this point, I cannot speculate. I suspect strongly that a publisher that doesn't want anything to do with you is maybe a publisher you don't want to deal with anyways, though. If, as someone with some well-formed ideas on these points, you get pushback it's possible that you're an asshole, but it's also possible that the publisher doesn't want to help you do a book.

It may be that the publisher would like instead to do their own book, using your pictures. Are you OK with that?