The Blog
Four (Sometimes Multi-Part) Questions for Book Designers—July 7th, 2007
With all apologies to Smashing Magazine … Smashing Magazine has posted the results of a survey they took, “35 Designers x 5 Questions”, that I found almost as helpful a piece to use as a starting point for brainstorming as any I have ever read. The one hitch is that...
All I Want
I just don’t understand why some publishers refuse to even consider allowing freelance book designers to work remotely. Mostly they talk about not being ble to meet in person as some kind of impediment. Well, this is the 21st century. Haven’t they heard of...
And Now This Week I Like It—June 29th, 2007
Last week I picked at things that irritated me about the 1987 first English translation of Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography (Die neue Typographie). To be fair, it now appears to me that I reacted—mostly to Robin Kinross’ excellent Introduction—to the statement that...
Die neue Typographie—June 22nd, 2007
In the movie, The Usual Suspects, there’s a scene in which it begins to sink in to those of us watching that if Keyser Soze exists, it may only be in Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal’s mind. Spacey steps outside the stationhouse he’s just been questioned in and his...
When One Thing Stands for Two Opposing Thoughts—June 16th, 2007
What an interesting bit of reading I did last night! Just before putting head to pillow I cracked open one of my favorite books of late, Designing books: practice and theory, by Jost Hochuli and Robin Kinross (London: Hyphen Press, 1996). Without quoting too many...
The Platform and Upgrade Conundrums—June 12th, 2007
Aside from the ever-present challenge of keeping new book design and layout projects coming in, both to keep working and just to stay fresh, I find the thorniest issue to be the question of when to upgrade. This pertains to both hardware and software. Without even...
What I Like to Do—June 4th, 2007
Having given some thought to the kinds of books I might not want to involve myself with, perhaps the time has come to consider the books I would like to help bring to press. Broadly, of course, aside from the sorts of books I prefer to avoid, any book that is a paying...
One of the Tough Issues—May 30th, 2007
I found myself taking a long, hard look the other day at the issue of just what kind of books I help into print after finishing layout on the sixth over the last year or so of a string of World War II histories. Interestingly, they were punctuated somewhere in the...
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Freelancer—May 26th, 2007
No matter how long a person works as a freelance graphic designer—in my case about seventeen years; fourteen straight on books alone—the best feeling in the world springs from hearing a client say they have chosen you for a job. If that is so, then the worst feeling...