Design 3

Now to the good stuff. Today we’ll talk about plac­ing poems, edit­ing para­graph styles – and as the con­sen­sus last time was more bal­ance of soft­ware and the­ory – more of that mys­ti­cal process of choos­ing type.

Plac­ing poems. With any luck, you saved your doc­u­ment from last time, so open it up.

Today I’m gonna demo with a poem by Shira Erlich­man, from her col­lec­tion Adver­tise­ment for a Human Being. Lucky you, plac­ing poems is EASY. Go to the File menu and choose Place…:

Nav­i­gate to the poem you want to drop in, select it and click Open:

Posi­tion your cur­sor (the sym­bol in it means it’s “loaded” with a doc­u­ment) at the top left cor­ner of the lower box you made with the margins:

…and drag to the lower-​​right cor­ner of that margin-​​box, as though you were drag­ging out a reg­u­lar text box:

Let go. Draw a new box in the upper margin-​​box for your title, copy & delete the title from the top of the poem, and put the title in there. For rea­sons I will reveal later, it is INCRED­I­BLY IMPOR­TANT that you assign the Title para­graph style to every sin­gle one of your titles.

When you’re done, and bar­ring a few changes in size and style I just made, it should look some­thing like this:

Now, if you used a poem as long as the one I chose, you’ll see a lit­tle red box in the lower-​​right cor­ner of your text box. This means there’s more of the poem, called “over­set text.” Click directly on it to “load” the cur­sor with the remain­ing text, move to the next page, and repeat the process above:

On type­faces. A few months back I brought up some of the con­sid­er­a­tions we give to fonts. In the case of Shira’s poem, I want my font mostly sim­ple, to off­set the styl­iza­tion and strange­nesses in the words. It should also, how­ever, carry a lit­tle flair, to acknowl­edge that strange­ness. I think our old friend Per­petua accom­plishes that well. Like­wise, I think the com­bi­na­tion of sharp and blunt edges in Cal­isto reflect some of the poems’ style, so I think I’ll go with that for the title.

Let’s take a look at them a lit­tle closer up:

To change the body font, click some­where other than the text box, and double-​​click the Body para­graph style. Click on Basic Char­ac­ter For­mats, as before, click Pre­view in the bot­tom left cor­ner, and play around to your heart’s con­tent. I changed lines to ital­ics in the text by select­ing them indi­vid­u­ally (with­out the use of Para­graph Styles) and chang­ing the style from the tool­bar at the top of the screen. To change the title font, the same applies.

Obvi­ously, you can go in any num­ber of direc­tions. What mat­ters most is that the type read hon­estly to you. Remem­ber that pre­sen­ta­tion is nec­es­sar­ily a com­po­nent of the poem, and should be treated no dif­fer­ently than enjamb­ment or even choice of words. I rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing ratio as a gen­eral rule:

75% rea­sons you can explain : 25% rea­sons you can’t.

I believe in self-​​evident moti­va­tion. Art that’s pushed entirely into a sci­en­tific mode, at least where book­mak­ing is con­cerned, is ster­ile and void of the mys­ti­cism that makes books worth their construction.

Now go forth and repeat the steps above for every poem in the book. When you’re done, save your work and check in later in the week for details on the Table of Con­tents and © Page.