32 Reasons Book Designers Are Crazy
October 3, 2011 
16 Comments
Yes, you heard me right. Laying out a book according to publishing-industry standards is a recipe for madness. So why do book designers fuss and bother over a host of sometimes contradictory rules when nobody else seems to care? Because we’re professionals, and just like doctors, accountants, and lawyers, we do the job right, whether or not the client understands the details involved.
Book designers have been trained to see the difference between ordinary text and professional typesetting, and once someone points out the issues, as I do below, you’ll see the difference, too. In addition, professional typesetting has been clinically proven to increase reading comprehension(1) so anyone who wants the reader to fully understand the text should demand professional typesetting as well.
Books look simple to do, but that’s because someone who knows the rules already took care of all of the problems. Here are just a few of the issues book designers attend to during the formatting process to give your book a professional appearance:
- We ensure facing pages end on the same baseline without the first line of a paragraph landing on the bottom of a page, or the last line of a paragraph landing on the top of a page. When the text doesn’t cooperate with these rules (which is often), we rework previous paragraphs and pages as needed.
- We fix paragraphs that end in a word with less than five characters (including punctuation) or a word fragment (the stub end of a hyphenated word).
- We find and fix hyphenated compound words (i.e., self-pub-lishing), both of which distract the reader.
- We eliminate word stacks—when the same word falls one above the other on several consecutive lines of text.
- We adjust any overly tight or loose lines that software sometimes allows through.
- We watch for rivers of white in the text—when word spaces fall in a pattern that is distracting to the reader.
- We eliminate hyphens at the bottom of a right-hand page so that the reader won’t have to hold a thought while the page is turned.
- We make sure the last page of a chapter has at least four lines of text.
- We use only a single space after all punctuation. (It’s OK to disobey your high school typing teacher in book layout.)
- We use proper dashes. Hyphens are used to hyphenate words and separate phone numbers. Em dashes are a form of punctuation, used to offset clauses in a sentence. En dashes, typically half the length of an em dash, are used to denote duration, as in 8:00–5:00, or August 12–14.
- We use true (curly) quotation marks and apostrophes. Using tick marks directly from the keyboard sends the message “I don’t care how this stuff looks.”
- We set all uppercase text slightly smaller than the surrounding text (or use small caps). All capitals SCREAM at the reader.
- We add letterspacing to capitalized text and small caps. Capitalized text or small caps appearing within normal text can appear too tight and crowded, and adding a little breathing room improves the look.
- We use oldstyle figures when available and appropriate. Oldstyle figures are also known as non-lining numerals, because they don’t line up on the baseline. They can be thought of as lower case numbers, and look better in text passages than the usual lining numerals.
- We use a slightly smaller point size for numbers when oldstyle numerals are not available. They blend in better and don’t jump at the reader.
- We use boldface and italic text sparingly. Bold text is like a magnet to our eyes, and it ruins the continuity of the text. Overuse of bold and italic can be a dead giveaway that your book is self-published.
- We avoid using underlined text. Underlined text is even more distracting than boldface and italics and it’s considered a typographic abomination that should be avoided.
- We reduce the © (copyright), ® (registered trademark), and ™ (trademark) characters, sometimes by as much as 50%, depending on the font.
- We follow the Chicago Manual of Style rules for ellipses ( . . . ). Chicago specifies a full word space between each period and on either side of the periods. Non-breaking spaces are used on the first word space and the spaces between the three periods to keep these elements with the previous word. A normal breaking space is used at the end of the ellipsis to allow the line to break here if needed.
- We decrease the size of ballot boxes. As a general rule, these characters should be about two points smaller than the surrounding text.
- We consider using other characters besides bullets (but not goofy icons like pointing fingers or lightning bolts). Just like ballot boxes, whatever you substitute should also be two points smaller than the text.
- We increase line spacing to improve readability in body text. Line spacing should be significantly greater than the space between words for maximum legibility, and should increase proportionally as the line length increases.
- We recommend serif typefaces for books because they are naturally easier to read than sans serif. When we read, our mind is trained to recognize the shapes of words rather than reading letter by letter. Serifs form a link between letters.
- We rarely set body text in 12 point or Times Roman. Text set too large often appears trivial, or meant for children. Start with 10-point and consider reducing by half a point size, depending on the font. Times Roman was designed for narrow newspaper columns. In a book, the compressed characters tire the eyes quickly.
- We decrease the line length and increase margins so the “book block” nestles comfortably on the page. The more white space around the book block, the better.
- We avoid letterspacing lowercase body text. In body text, loose spacing always decreases legibility.
We make word spacing fairly close because it’s easier to read. - We choose an alignment option that suits the text. Justified text imparts a formal tone, whereas ragged text is more casual and personal.
- We set hyphenation options that won’t distract the reader; at least three characters should be left behind and at least four characters should be carried to the next line (so that “-ing” doesn’t fall on the next line).
- We make sure the stub-end of a hyphenated word is not the last word of a paragraph. In most cases, it’s undesirable to end a paragraph with a single word. This is especially undesirable if the word is shorter than four characters.
- We limit the number of consecutively hyphenated lines to two or three. Beyond this, it appears as if diving boards or ladders are present on the right side of your paragraph.
- We avoid beginning or ending three consecutive lines with the same word. Software cannot find this distracting situation, so it’s necessary to look for and correct this manually.
- We avoid hyphenating or breaking proper names, capitalized words and titles. The best way to prevent this from happening is to type non-breaking spaces between proper names.
These items are only the beginning, believe it or not. So yes, book designers are crazy…about quality. Software out of the box only goes so far . . . it is human intervention that turns your manuscript into typographic art, and when you see the difference a book designer can make, we know you’ll agree that this time is well-spent.
(1) Type and Layout, by Colin Wheildon.
Additional material from: Digital Type Design Guide: The Page Designer’s Guide to Working with Type by Sean Cavanaugh.
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Book design should be simple yet attractive to the readers.
Thanks for the post. I didn’t know much about book designers. That’s some crazy piece of information.
I agree with Allison. people often forget the impact of good designing.
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Thanks for taking the time to reply, Sakib. The best book design is invisible. It invites the reader in and allows them to focus on the content without distraction. Glad I could help.
Michele DeFilippo recently posted..Why Book Publishers Need a Corporate Image
It is hard to design a book and it needs a time to think for it. It is a matter of fitted the themes of the content of the books. Well it is easily to draw hard to come up a good subject of it. I appreciated that work of a designer for they done their part to make the readers love to patronized their work. Thanks it is very valuable site to me.
These 32 reasons would drive book designers crazy. It’s hard to get a book properly and uniquely designed because aside from the Title of the book, design also helps in getting the attention of readers. Pretty tough job!
JohnC recently posted..Two-vehicle deer collision causes heavy damage
Yes and no, John. Book design is like anything else…when you do it every day, you get good at it, and it gets easier. I wrote the post to counter the common misconception that there’s “nothing to it.” Few of us understand the complexities of another person’s job, but that doesn’t stop very big companies and so-called experts from telling authors that they can lay out their own book in Word, with generally hideous results.
Michele DeFilippo recently posted..Why Book Publishers Need a Corporate Image
Thank you all for your replies. I guess I’ve learned something here…that it’s now necessary to explain what book designers do. For most of my life, I’ve worked for publishers and ad agencies. My clients understood what we did and why, so there was never a need to explain. The environment is different now, but the opportunities are greater as well.
Michele DeFilippo recently posted..Why Book Publishers Need a Corporate Image
Excellent post! Reminded me of my years as editor at Harper & Row!
Yes, this is a very demanding job and an important one if you want to have a professional looking printed book.
But what about ebooks? I have a feeling that additional rules apply – especially on the Kindle and phones where screen are SMALLER…For one thing, I feel more paragraphs should be worked in than in a normal printed text? What is your opinion?
PS. Of course, you’re right, the 32 points you made should have been numbered…What caused those letters to crop up?
I know, it’s always back to the difficulties of printing virtual texts…still one day I hope that even self-pubbed authors will manage it (in fact, that’s why I use BookBaby and I’m quite pleased with the quality of the converted files they produce…)
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I used to give talks on how to self publish, and collected self published books. They were always easy to find because the author hadn’t considered the points above.
The untrained eye may not be able to say why a non-professionally typeset book is different, but instinctively we can spot them. Thanks for a really useful post.
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Thanks for taking the time to post. It’s comforting to know at least one other person agrees with me.
Michele DeFilippo recently posted..Why Book Publishers Need a Corporate Image
I surely agree with the 32 reasons that you have stated here in your blog. Book designers have so many ideas and thoughts in mind which they use in coming up with their own unique and attractive books. They are not actually crazy, they just have lots of ideas which serves as their tool in creating an excellent output.
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This is a great post, and very much applies to eBooks as well, especially widow/orphan control which is, unfortunately, a complete mess on Kindle-formatted eBooks.
It’s painful for anyone trained in typography to look at eBooks at present. I’m sure the situation will improve (at least I hope so!) because typographic spacing standards evolved for a reason…reading comprehension. Plus, I just refuse to believe that people will abandon beauty for long. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Michele DeFilippo recently posted..Why Book Publishers Need a Corporate Image
Twitter: AllisonDDuncan
October 3, 2011 at 10:54 PM
It’s always amazing the sheer amount of work necessary to get a book to look and feel right. So often people just completely disregard all that and then wonder why their book isn’t selling or, worse still, gets horrible reviews.
Thanks for keeping it real!
Allison Duncan recently posted..Social Media Experts – The Tarnished Truths
Thanks, Ivin. Those words from you mean alot. I just have one question: Why are the items listed with letters, not numbers?
Michele DeFilippo recently posted..Why Book Publishers Need a Corporate Image
Hello Michele. This is a HIGH-VALUE post. Thank you so much for a great post. It’s nice to look from the perspective of a book designer. Very valuable.