Design 1

Before we get started. We’re going to be look­ing at design pri­mar­ily in InDe­sign, because that’s what I use, and how I can explain it best. 95% of InDesign’s fea­tures have corol­lar­ies in Word, Google Docs, and other soft­ware – they’re just not as sophis­ti­cated or intu­itive else­where. So I encour­age you, before any­thing, to get to a copy of InDe­sign; it will make your lay­out job expo­nen­tially eas­ier. Many col­lege com­puter labs have it loaded, and if you fore­see mak­ing more than one chap­book in the next five years, it’s worth the invest­ment to acquire a copy.

Now let’s tour a few impor­tant con­cepts. Every step of book­mak­ing should be a con­scious deci­sion – even the happy acci­dents have great value.

Con­sider the themes of your book. Is it heavy, gloomy, macabre? Light, warm, invit­ing? Some pro­pri­etary blend? Write a hand­ful of words on a sticky and slap it on the edge of your screen. You’ll come back to them A LOT.

Book dimen­sions. By far the eas­i­est are 8.5” x 5.5”. That’s a letter-​​sized sheet folded length­wise in half, and just about every­one starts here. If you have access to a ream cut­ter or pow­ered cut­ter, con­sider other dimen­sions. Most copy shops have them, and I rec­om­mend look­ing local, as Kinko’s charges through the nose.

The type­face is crit­i­cal. Not only does it sub­tly express, reflect, or pur­pose­fully oppose the themes of your book – it’s the gate­keeper of readability.

Serif or sans serif: The for­mer has a warmer, pre-​​20^th cen­tury feel, the lat­ter a colder, more mechan­i­cal feel. For con­text, most lit­er­a­ture is printed with a ser­ifed font, and most tech­ni­cal writ­ing in sans serif. It’s a VERY rare book that can suc­cess­fully devi­ate from this, and if you haven’t designed a few dozen books already, don’t buck tra­di­tion just yet.

Body face: If you use a lot of long lines or prose, con­sider a lighter, thin­ner font. Baskerville and Bembo are both clas­sics, for good rea­son, with many dif­fer­ent fonts (reg­u­lar, italic, bold, bold italic, etc) and avail­able on the web. Con­versely, a col­lec­tion of haiku can ben­e­fit from thicker lines, giv­ing the poems more weight. Some­thing like Book­man Old Style or Spec­trum might suit this well. (Exam­ple below.)

Title face: While you do want the title to have a sim­i­lar feel to the body, you don’t need to use the same font. A lit­tle exper­i­men­ta­tion can yield remark­able results. Exam­ine them as com­ple­men­tary objects; does the title face do some­thing the body doesn’t, or visa versa? Does the dif­fer­ence reflect some­thing in the themes? Exam­ine them at obnox­ious zoom ratios (800%, 1600%) and look at all the lit­tle embell­ish­ments of each type­face. Then look at them 100% again and make sure they don’t look stu­pid together.

It’s also a good idea to keep a run­ning list of cliches in your head. Papyrus, Times/​New Roman, Courier, and Comic Sans are all hack­neyed, overused and sto­ry­less. Let’s look at the first page of Christo­pher Jones’s Swamp Yan­kee:

The title is set in Bembo Italic, the body in Day Roman. I wanted some­thing so fancy that it became play­ful, but not over-​​the-​​top. I wanted to reflect the inter­sec­tion of Jones’s mas­ter­ful con­trol and hys­ter­i­cally dark themes.

White­space is also crit­i­cal. It can kill or ele­vate your reader’s expe­ri­ence. Give your words room to breathe.

Mar­gins need more space than you think. Con­sider how much you’ll want when decid­ing the dimen­sions of the book. In many ways, the pur­pose of mar­gins is to frame the work on the page. Give it too small a frame and the reader won’t instinc­tively dis­tin­guish it from the rest of his vision. Remem­ber, the book is a con­tainer for the poem, and you want to give it room to expand and con­tract with­out it feel­ing clois­tered. Unless that’s the aes­thetic you’ve got in mind, in which case, pro­ceed care­fully. Con­sider the mar­gin choices above.

The gen­er­ous spac­ing iso­lates the poem on the page, giv­ing it room to be itself – an object of ele­vated lan­guage – with­out the outer world hedg­ing in. The space is also painstak­ingly bal­anced to give the poem a vaguely-​​centered feel­ing, with­out push­ing it exactly into the cen­ter of the page, which would be dis­tract­ing. If you want your work to be read on its own terms, you must under­stand how it relates to the space around it.

“Lead­ing” mea­sures the space between lines. Word doesn’t give you many options with it, but at least with poems, you can muck around with “Para­graph Spac­ing” in the Align­ment and Spac­ing palette, which allows more gran­u­lar adjust­ments. Here’s the dif­fer­ence between stan­dard lead­ing and lead­ing with breath­ing room. The mea­sure­ments refer to val­ues in InDesign:

Again, allow room to breathe. The sweet spot (which I may not have found above, and Bill for­give me) is between crushed together and so far apart they read as one-​​line stan­zas. You’ll know you’ve got it when you don’t feel dis­tracted by the sur­round­ing lines. It’s not only a better-​​looking poem, it’s actu­ally eas­ier on the eye and the con­cen­tra­tion! What’s to lose?