Rant: Book Design

Caveat: I know next to nothing about the book publishing industry, especially from the inside.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that some publishers pay very little attention to the readability and design of their books and make enjoying them quite difficult on the reader. Gaudy and attention-less cover art, problem-creating page margins, mind-numbing fully justified paragraphs, font and leading choices that make the text dizzyingly dense, and on and on. I tend to think of these books in two classes: new books on one hand, reprints/2nd editions on the other.

The editorial process on new volumes understandably forces some hard choices on the part of both author and designer: a limit on page count, budgeted price, target audience, etc., all factor into the final physical object with which I sit in my chair and read. I’m not excusing stunningly bad design of new books, but simply granting these more grace than the second class.

It is in the realm of new editions of older works that such bad design is nearly inexcusable. First, if the work is valuable enough to re-edit and re-issue, then it is valuable enough to pay close attention to the details of readability. Second, the author is most likely long dead, so any editorial choices about excising portions of the text are moot; the word count is fixed. 

The entailments of these two premises should make a huge difference in the finished product. Let’s use the new, expensive, 31 volume study edition of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics published by T&T Clark as an example. This project was a monumental effort of T&T Clark and scholars at Princeton Theological Seminary, the selling points of which were “a new layout and a bigger format … translations of all Latin and Greek texts.” It is “reader friendly.” These tried to address the biggest complaints with the old paperback set, namely its ridiculously dense text blocks and the untranslated quotes Barth used.

The old set weighed in at 8,936 pages and 24.2 lbs. If the text is fixed in length, but nearly unreadable, we would expect the new edition to be much longer: use more paper to display the same amount of text by increasing point size and leading, right? Well, wrong you are. The new is 8,676 pages as a set but weighs 7 lbs more (31.3 lbs from having a bit more page real estate to work with). Despite the slightly larger text area, fewer pages means more characters per page. This shows up in point size and line length: the old capitals were approx. 3mm tall, but the new just over 2mm, and the old line averaged about 57 characters wide, but the new averages 85 (!). 

These data, combined with the new crisply-printed digital Baskerville and its fully justified paragraphs, make the new “reader friendly” edition far worse to read than the old facsimile paperbacks. It seems John Baskerville’s critics in the 1760s were simply anticipating the digital printing of his type when they said it damaged the eyes. So while the page is less “black,” it is less readable.

The obvious solution to this is to choose a less-contrastive typeface, say Fournier, Minion, or Dante, and/or to slightly increase the point size and leading. A ragged-right justification would do nobody any harm, either. If these changes were made, the question then becomes: how many more pages would this monstrous set have? 300? If so, then the new would equal the old set’s heft and I doubt anyone would care. Priced at $1,095, I also doubt that an extra 300 pages would need to increase the cost or market price. 

In new editions of old works, these design decisions seem very difficult to justify. The end product should be at least a marginal improvement on the old, with its design taking account of the latest technology as well as tested and true principles of page design. The authors and readers of great books like the Church Dogmatics deserve at least that.

No More Than a Fraction of Our Dissatisfactions

“Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surrounding even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch. Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things.

More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall – in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.”

[Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, 25; true, if a bit overblown]

I Just Like It That Way

This passage was very helpful to me yesterday in a staff meeting:

“It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions. The functional requirements—the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth—are concrete and measurable. The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation. These might be: I just like to set my headlines in Bodoni, or I just like to make my products blobby, or I just like to cover my buildings in gridded white porcelain panels. In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth—‘I don’t know, I just like it that way’—simply won’t do.

So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals. As Frankfurt points out, it’s beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: ‘It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.’”

[Michael Bierut, “On (Design) Bullshit,” #58 in Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, 176]

The most distinctive element of ITC Garamond is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibility, but only in the same way that dog poop’s creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.
» Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond,” #46 in Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design

‘World class’ just means banal » Jonathan Glancey

Agreed, especially re: Hertzog & de Meuron’s proposed hotel on Katajanokka in Helsinki (which recently failed to gain approval). [Via Lewism, who says, “When someone tries to make your city perfect you know they have already screwed it up.”]

“The joy of great cities lies in their differences. What’s special about Stockholm is different from what makes London or Vienna attractive. The “world class city”, and its gormless sibling, the ‘world class place’, is a political slogan, conjured by globally minded, air-travel addicted wonks, that has been adopted, sadly and dimly, by politicians, quangos and planners around the world.…

Stockholm is not alone. Architects in neighbouring Helsinki, a city that until very recently has been wonderfully itself, are slowly coming to terms with the fact that their Baltic city is about to get the ‘world class’ treatment. This means historic buildings being vandalised to ensure they suit the needs of wilfully vulgar global ‘brand’ shops, the rerouting of trams from the historic centre because these, apparently, aren’t best suited to tourist-oriented ‘pedestrianisation’ schemes and the loss of a culture famous for fighting off invaders and going its own happily modest way. ‘World class cities’ spells architectural bombast, bling and banality.”

Source: bdonline.co.uk