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Category Archives: book typography

Book Design Basics Part 1: Margins and Leading

The World's Greatest Book Posted on October 24, 2011 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
book designer

Book design is a lost art. Though book design discussions usually focus on covers, consider how much more time a reader spends staring at the text. An elegant book block is just as important. Decades ago, professional tradesmen practiced the … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged book block, book design, bookblock, Canons of Page Design, Dave Bricker, leading, margins, page design, page layout, Tschichold, type design, typesetting, typography, Van de Graaf

Book Design Basics Part 2: Optical Margins, Indents and Periods

The World's Greatest Book Posted on November 3, 2011 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
wood type

Part 2 of Fundamentals of Book Design explores optical margins, paragraph formatting and spaces. Read about margins, layout and leading in Part 1. The self-publishing revolution is (aside from the Internet) the greatest thing ever to happen to freedom of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged book block, book design, bookblock, Canons of Page Design, CMOS, consecutive spaces, Dave Bricker, double spaces, indent, InDesign, kerning, leading, letter spacing, margins, MLA, optical margins, page design, page layout, spaces, Tschichold, type design, typesetting, typography, Van de Graaf

Book Design Basics Part 3: Running The Numbers

The World's Greatest Book Posted on November 21, 2011 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
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Part 3 of Book Design Basics explores better ways to present numbers on your pages. Numbers (called figures) look simple at first glance, but they present interesting typesetting challenges. Many digital typefaces offer several number styles but few designers know … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged book block, book design, bookblock, Dave Bricker, expert fonts, figures, fonts, InDesign, kerning, leading, letter spacing, lining figures, margins, numbers, oldstyle figures, optical margins, page design, page layout, spaces, tabular figures, type design, typefaces, typesetting, typography

Book Design Basics: Choosing a Book Font

The World's Greatest Book Posted on December 20, 2015 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

Selecting a book font seems simple enough, but important subtleties and fine points of typography are not obvious to the average writer. This article offers insights into fonts suitable for book typography. Though it won’t turn the average author into … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged Dave Bricker

Book Design Basics: Small Capitals – Avoiding Capital Offenses

The World's Greatest Book Posted on December 19, 2011 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
electric chair

Use of Small Capitals—uppercase characters designed at lowercase scale—is one aspect of writing and book design that isn’t taught in grammar school. We all know every sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. We all should … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged abbreviation, acronyms, big and small caps, book design, capital letters, capitalization, capitals, Dave Bricker, periods in acronyms, small capitals, small caps, typesetting, typography, writing

Book Design Basics: Quotation Marks and Primes

The World's Greatest Book Posted on October 25, 2015 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

Writers often ask about the difference between “straight” or “dumb” quotation marks and traditional printers’ quotes, commonly referred to as “smart quotes” or “curly quotes.” Add in the need to distinguish between left single quotes and apostrophes, and the primes … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing, Writing | Tagged Dave Bricker

Book Design Basics – Use Hyphens for Justified Type

The World's Greatest Book Posted on August 2, 2014 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

Hyphens are an important contributor to elegant, easy-to-read typography, especially when text is fully justified as is the convention in book typography. This article explains how justified text works, and how proper hyphenation improves the legibility of your type. Text … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing

Book Design Basics – Drop Caps and Initial Impressions

The World's Greatest Book Posted on January 23, 2012 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

NITIAL CAPITALS have historical roots in the early days of book design; their use predates the printing press and the invention of moveable type. Today’s initial caps are not as fancy as those carefully rendered in gold leaf in ancient … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged baseline initials, book design, capitals, drop capitals, drop caps, hanging initials, InDesign, initial capitals, initial caps, initials, self publishing, typesetting, typography

Book Design Basics – Dashes, Hyphens and Dots

The World's Greatest Book Posted on December 5, 2011 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
telegraph

I particularly like this section on dashes, hyphens and dots because it goes beyond typographic aesthetics to explore how we can communicate more effectively as writers. The subtle intricacies of hyphens and dashes affect all authors whether they typeset their … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing, Writing | Tagged book design, colon, dash, Dave Bricker, dot dot dot, ellipses, ellipsis, em-dash, en-dash, hyphen, hyphenation, parentheses, punctuation, typesetting, typography, writing

Page Layout: Illustrated Books and the Rule of Thirds

The World's Greatest Book Posted on September 27, 2014 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

This article explores page layout strategies for books based on the Rule of Thirds. A grid system based on traditional guidelines ensures harmonious proportions and placement of objects on a page. Page layout for books is governed by a range of factors. Trade … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing

Book Design – Revisiting Classic Layout for Print and EBooks

The World's Greatest Book Posted on February 21, 2014 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

Book design has changed since publishing became a gigantic industry. Typesetting was once performed by trained craftsmen who apprenticed to masters before inking their own plates. Phototypesetting arrived in the 1960s and by the late 1980s, digital publishing transferred the … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing

Simulating the Appearance of Traditional Print

The World's Greatest Book Posted on September 19, 2014 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

Digital typography offers capabilities that printers working with hot lead type and wood type could only dream of. Digital type can be stretched and resized infinitely, justified within unusual boundaries, or wrapped around almost any shape. And yet, traditional letterpress … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing

Fine Control Over Justified Text

The World's Greatest Book Posted on August 22, 2014 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023

Page layout programs like Adobe Indesign and Quark, allow typographers to exert fine control over justified text to remove gaps and “rivers.” The default settings produce “pretty good” results—better than a word processor—but a few small tweaks will dramatically improve … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography

How Many Spaces After a Period? Ending the Debate

The World's Greatest Book Posted on March 27, 2013 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
spaces after period

Few subjects arouse more passion among writers and designers than the debate over how many spaces should follow a period. If you adhere to a style manual, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t specify a single-space. Chicago and … Continue reading →

Posted in book typography, Publishing, Writing

Proposed Standards for Book Typography

The World's Greatest Book Posted on December 2, 2012 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
typographic Standards

The word processor has placed new burdens on writers to understand how to use italics, big and small capitals, dashes, hyphens, initials, etc. Writers who do their own typesetting often produce mediocre results. Likewise, trade publishers sacrifice typographic aesthetics when … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing

Book Typography: The Crystal Goblet by Beatrice Warde

The World's Greatest Book Posted on November 10, 2011 by Dave BrickerJanuary 2, 2023
Beatrice Warde

Here is the first of a series of occasional posts that explore the contributions of great typographers and typography books to the book designer’s art. Designers, writers and publishers will benefit from Beatrice Warde’s eloquent perspectives on the craft of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Design, book typography, Self-Publishing | Tagged Beatrice Warde, book design, broadsheet, crystal goblet, Dave Bricker, monotype, printing office, self publishing, Stanley Morrison, this is a printing office, type, type design
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