The Good Design Book

Good Friday: Designing the Book

This was a busy-ish week for the book. I spoke with two potential contributing writers both of whom I’m very excited about. I expect to announce a couple of our writers next week.

We had some welcome support from our friends at various blogs who have graciously helped spread the word about our request for submissions. Thanks especially to Steve and Stephanie at UnBeige, Armin Vit at Under Consideration, Dexigner, and our new friends at DESIGN 21. One of the most challenging parts of putting together a book like this is assembling a representative selection of compelling work. Of course we have our resources (and with them our prejudices), but getting the word out to new and interesting designers is essential to the diversity and relevance of the book. If you’re considering submitting work for consideration I encourage you to do it early. When I worked on my last book about 50% of the work came in just before the deadline. The other 50% came in just after.

Also this week, we took our first good hard look at some design options.

As you can see, we’re a pretty small design office — just me, Tim, Intern* and a part-time office manager. Because of this, everyone is pretty much involved with everything. Intern gets as much say Tim. Tim gets as much say as I. To be honest, I do get the last word (but that doesn’t always mean doing it my way). Earlier this week we printed out three different directions for the book design and reviewed them as a group.

Version 1 is based around the idea of a book within a book. All the work in the book would be shot on another, smaller book, centered within the larger physical book. Accompanying credits and text would populate the margins. The idea is a not-so-subtle comment on the celebration of image over substance in most design books, but it also places the work within a context of reverence that we think is interesting. It’s a bit of a construct, to be sure, but there are some engaging and very appropriate elements to it that we’re going to try to take further.

Version 2 is an undersized book — almost a pocket book. The idea here is to make the book something you would primarily read (and to make the graphic images more secondary). There were merits to both the concept and the execution of this direction, but we pretty much tossed it out immediately. I’m really only interested in the best ideas, and both of the other alternatives were better than this. There’s not much sense in discussing the lesser concept when there are two much better ideas that need some nurturing.

Version 3 is a little difficult to describe here. It relies heavily on color so the black and white printouts don’t do it many favors. The basic premise is that each section would be denoted by a color and that color would be pervasive throughout the section. The original thought was to use colored stock and divide it among the signatures, but printing the color offers us a little more control with regard to the pacing of the book and the specific hierarchies on the page. The idea is that the color would show through many of the images. It wouldn’t be invasive, disruptive or obfuscatory — think of it more like the effect of printing something on offwhite stock versus bright white. The theory behind this use of color is that it could be used to mediate the dialogue between the visual, textual and subtextual narratives. How exactly it does this I’ll explain later — if this idea gets picked up.

Covers are still a bit of a mystery, but we’re submitting our design proposals to HOW next week, so that’s the immediate task at hand.

*We decided this week that henceforth our intern will not be referred to by name. Instead we address him simply as “Intern.” It is also required this be pronounced in a Scottish accent.