4word Elegance

Looking good . . . let’s look at designs for publications and think about what makes a printed page work. We know that typefaces are designed in great detail and some page proportions are based on Pythagoras’s Golden Section, the harmonious ratio of 1:1.6141. But rules can be broken – here we are more concerned with the practical side of the production so that your publication takes account of the best way of working with your material and your printer. We will look at cover design, but first let us define page design. We want:

· Legibility
· Ease of absorption of information
· Suitability for subject matter

You want to clarify and present the author’s material effectively – well, design will help and so it should be seen as part of the editorial process.
But there is a conflict between getting a well-designed, legible page and one that maximises the amount of text on it, because the more text on a page the fewer the pages and therefore the lower the print costs. So, it is elegance versus economics, and we need to strike a happy medium.

The raw material may consist of text, in different sizes, tables, line art, photographs and maps. Let’s look at some page design specifics; here are six design considerations:

· format
· typesize
· measure
· typeface
· interline spacing
· page make up

The trimmed size. What size should your publication be? It needs to fit on a shelf vertically but it also helps to choose a size that matches one of the standard sizes of paper for a printing press.

It need not be A5 or A4, it can be one of the traditional book sizes such as demy and royal, and crown quarto – if you want your text in two columns you will need this last size at least. A useful one is pinched crown quarto, 246 by 171 millimetres: this is the maximum page size that will go on a large book press as an arrangement of 16 pages each side of the sheet, giving the best value for money as far as page size goes.

The editorial process of organising the subject matter is expressed in print by the typesize hierarchy – main text, extracts, footnotes, captions, and so on. The editor defines the hierarchy and the typesetter can suggest different treatments for them. Here are some general guidelines: First think about the main text size then go one size down from it for extracts; or set them in the same size but distinguish them by indenting them or setting them unjustified. If there are a lot of extracts do not make them too dramatically different because it is wearisome to the reader. Set captions one size down and footnotes two sizes.

This is the width of the text area, the line length, inside the margins surrounding it. The trick is to get the reader to ‘follow the thread’ – to reach the end of the line without losing the thread, and be able to go on to the next line without rereading the start of the same line.

Do not make the line too long or too short: ideally you should have 11 words on a line, although with double column you can go as low as 6 or 7. The absolute minimum for multi-column text is 5 words, and they need to be set unjustified. Discontinuous text such as bibliographies and footnotes can accept as many as 15 words a line, providing you have plenty of interline spacing. In continuous text do not go above 14 words.

Book designers talk about a typeface having a ‘tone of voice’ that suits the text. Decorative typefaces suit, say, romantic prose. There is a wide range of book faces to suit your publications but stick with roman typefaces – the subtle difference between thick and thin strokes make them easy to read. Sans serif typefaces, those plain ones with no fancy bits are ideal for road signs but no good for sustained reading. It’s been calculated that it takes 7½% longer to read them than a serif face. But they are very good for tabular material and for headings.

Think about the paper when considering the typeface. Delicate, spindly typefaces do not sit well on antique wove. A heavy-contrast face like Bodoni will dazzle on art paper. The most economic typefaces are Ehrhardt and Times because they are narrow but you will need a very long stretch of text before you can save a page if you use them. Reliable stand-bys are Baskerville and Garamond, both well-rounded with elegant italics.

Interline spacing is the space between each line, called leading from when it was made of little strips of lead. It is a subtle way of gaining readability and much ignored nowadays. Appearing size is more important than nominal point size and getting the line spacing right is one of the fundamentals of good design. Half-close your eyes and the ideal page appears as an orderly series of strips of black separated by horizontal channels of white space. Otherwise a page looks like a lot of grey, muddled, isolated clusters.

A good maxim is – There’s more danger in crowding the lines than in crowding the words. This means that words should be close up; not loosely spaced, but lines should have ‘separation’. And when we consider the spacing between lines, it is not the typesize, the height from the base of a y or tip of a b, that matters; it is the x-height – the height of letters not counting their ascenders and descenders (the branches on d and k and roots on g and p that grow from them).

To sum up on leading, books and journals would be more readable if the typesize were reduced by ½ or one point but keeping the same number of lines per page.

Page make up is the total composition of the page area, including margins round the edge, and the contents – pictures, tables and text, all arranged in hierarchical order.

It helps to think of the page as a window. The white of the page is the light, enabling you to see what is through the window. So white is what makes the page legible and the use of white is more important than the use of black. Here are some guidelines:

The most widely-used amount of leading is 20% - that is why so much text is set in 10 point on a 12 point body. But the longer the measure the more leading needed.

Similarly, the smaller the typesize, the more leading needed, just because it will need help to make it readable.

Big x height means big leading – Palatino with its large x-height is too often seen without the leading it deserves.

If you sacrifice elegance on the altar of economics and are determined to jam text on the page, then choose a double-column format.

First, identify the target audience – is it library users, individual subscribers receiving copies in the post, book buyers in a shop, book buyers over the net? The reader should want to pick up the book, whether he or she finds it in a library, a bookshop or even a second-hand bookshop, or on the mat with the morning post. Then provide the maximum impact you can afford. There is now such a proliferation of print, and every publication is competing for prestige and library space, that we have become accustomed to greater use of colour and to covers which advertise their contents, at a cost not much greater than single colour printing. The most economical form of cover or jacket for casebound books was the single colour (usually black) lettered printing on an unvarnished colour board. This was considered sufficient for librarians and the dedicated reader. These design limitations can produce an excellent result but now there is more choice.

Roller power on modern presses and digital data mean that a good colour density can be achieved with ink, rather than the board, and should be repeatable on subsequent printings. Printing a stock of one or more colours for the year and overprinting in black or another strong colour is still an economical option for very short runs of journals. Varnishing or laminating in matt and gloss means that fingerprints rub off rather than soak in. Where the cover provides the only colour in a book, use the cover as the means to illustrate a coloured item appearing in the text. Use the type in different colours to effect and use a strong ink colour reversed out in white, with or without a line illustration, where the runs are very short. Change the design from time to time for high days and holidays – this gives the impact without having to alter the established format.

Librarians demand a clear identity, and the positioning of some items on the cover, such as the ISSN. This is the designer’s opportunity to brand the cover with the publisher’s style. Use a logo on the spine, but design it to be narrow if you have thin publications. Provide a spine if possible and if the publication is to stand on a shelf – even 64 pages are wide enough for some lettering. This identity can be carried on into your web site style.

If the publication is to be carried about or constantly handled as a reference book, its binding and cover should be planned accordingly.
Try to avoid designs which can easily go wrong in binding. The calculation of paper thickness is not an exact science, particularly for coated stock. You may not know how much glue will be added by the binder, or whether the sections are nipped (clamped under pressure to expel air) before binding. Avoid two fixed verticals in the spine, one is quite enough. Allow room for the spine lettering to breath and if you have wrapped lines make sure they can wrap across at least two of the three surfaces without looking foolish. Try to avoid thin covers and very shiny surfaces – what is good for magazines is not necessarily so good for shorter run publications.

This is your chance to dress up, but keep the tailor in mind as you plan your outfit, and keep it simple. That way your covers will fit, as well as look good.

Stump line: last line of a left-hand page ending with a hyphenated word. Widow: short last line of a paragraph at the head of a page.
Orphan: the first (indented) line of a paragraph at the foot of a page.
Less than 5 lines on the final page of an article of chapter.
Line breaks: no more than 2 successive hyphens, the purists say – but a run of hyphenated words is a lesser evil than widely-spaced words.

Vertical justification – ‘feathering’ is very subtle increases in interline spacing than can ensure columns balance.
Facing pages can each go a line deep or short to assist makeup.
Club lines: last short line of paragraph at end of page.

Do not switch it off – you will have widely-spaced, even letterspaced words – a man who would letterspace lower-case would steal sheep, the type designer Frederic Goudy used to say. Generally typesetting programs make good word breaks but still check proofs. Ensure stubs, the first or last part of a hyphenated word, have at least three letters (except for in-defensible, indefensib-ly, etc). Divide between syllables or natural parts of a word. When in doubt divide after a vowel.

On short pages, set as immediately underneath the text, not at the foot of the page.
A single short footnote can be centred. Long footnotes are distracting, tedious to read and, when they extend to a second page, a failure of make up.

Demy octavo 216 x 138mm
Royal octavo 234 x 156 mm
Crown quarto 246 x 189mm
Pinched crown quarto 246 x 171mm
A5 210 x 148mm
A4 297 x 210mm
Remember, if your publication is unsewn, the perfect binding process trims 3mm of paper and so reduces the back margin. You will need to build in an allowance for that by increasing the size of the back margin.

Horizontally, let the type measure be 70-75% of the total page width, then divide the remaining white space in a ratio of 1:1½, with the bigger margin placed on the outside of the page.
Vertically, 75-85% of the total page depth gives a good balance. Again, don’t just share out the remaining space top and bottom equally – put slightly more less than twice the head margin at the foot of the page.
As a very rough guide, the ratios of space clockwise around a right-hand page (that’s starting at the backs, then head, then foredge, then feet) are:
1 1¼ 1½ 2

Here are some page areas, along with suitable margins in millimetres (ignore folios at the foot of the page):

Demy 216 x 138mm 15 backs 15 heads 20 fore 25 foot
Royal 234 x 156mm 15 backs 15 heads 18 fore 25 foot
A4 297 x 210mm 15 backs 15 heads 20 fore 25 foot

Define their hierarchy and label them ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc. Choose from caps, upper and lower case, bold, small caps or italic. Position centred, ranged left or indented a few picas from left. Try to be consistent on one of these positions for the first two or three levels of heading, in order to develop a rhythm. Centred heads are more prominent and thus more important.

If you want to work out how many pages your manuscript will make the average English word has five letters plus one space. This amount was based on calculations made from articles in an edition of The Times - a leader, an article by H G Wells and a speech by George Bernard Shaw. Technical texts can increase this average very slightly. If the manuscript is in Microsoft Word, you can check for yourself on Tools, Word Count. The amount of text can vary by as much as 25%, depending on the typeface. As a rough guide, Demy octavo format has 2500 letters and spaces per page, Royal octavo 3000 and A4 double column, 6000.

The position of running heads (ranged left or centred) should echo the alignment of headings in the text. There is a need for them to be distinguished from text – letterspaced small caps have been fashionable for the last 500 years, or you could consider italic.

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