As I’m gaining more experience in interior book design, I am struck by the focus people have on the niftiness of the tool over curiosity about the actual knowledge (principles) of book design. Book design (typesetting back in the days before desktop publishing software) has a multi-hundred-year history of its own, where best practices developed over time to create readable text on printed paper.

I am determined not to get stuck in worship of the tool (InDesign) over mastering the principles of good design for print, and also e-book, production. InDesign is a tool with lots and lots of features and internal tools to manipulate the look of text and illustrations on a page; but it’s almost neutral as to best practices for actual design. The default settings do tend to lean in the direction of how books are usually designed, but this is a skeletal structure. Many decisions still must be made by the designer as to how the book will actually look when it’s finished, and most importantly, how readable it will be.

A Visible Story Hierarchy for Nonfiction

I’ve been indexing books from traditional publishers for many years, and I’ve noticed how the layout of illustrations and text has affected readability. One of my pet peeves as an indexer has been bad heading style choices. If main headings and subheadings in the text are hard to distinguish (close to the same size, same font style, etc.), it can be very difficult to figure out where you are in the chapter’s story or argument hierarchy. Big problem for the indexer, but also for the reader trying to track what’s related to what and how.

Readability in the Design

Yes, readability is also about content: grammar, writing style, basic storytelling ability. Readers often take for granted is how much the book’s design plays into the smoothness of the reading experience. Especially in this time of self-publishing, many writers are taking shortcuts on all sorts of aspects of book production to save money, but in the end the quality suffers, and readers may end up avoiding books or not recommending them to others, sometimes without knowing consciously why they don’t like the book. Story may be good, but there are too many distracting proofreading errors, or story may be good, but the text font is hard to decipher and all the words are crowded onto the page with very little white space to give rest to the eyes.

I am determined to make sure I get the cumulative knowledge about book design principles so I can tailor the tool (InDesign) to the best practices I want to adopt. I’ve already changed at least one default line spacing setting as a result of reading the book design philosophy of an experienced designer, Stephen Tiano. I’m really excited about continuing my learning curve on both the principles and tools of book design, but the principles will always trump the tool. If you want to produce a professional looking book, dear writers, please do not neglect investment in professional design.

First and foremost, give your text room to breathe.

Microsoft Word and Book Layout

Word, though, is not a great document layout program. Because you write first and often add styles to paragraphs later (do you know how to use MS Word Styles?), it’s easy to add inconsistencies. And if you don’t use the primitive layout tools in Word at all, your chapter titles could all look different, etc.

What I’m getting used to in InDesign is the concept of design first, content later. With Word, I can write in whatever font and with whatever default layout exists, and then add styles later. With InDesign, I have to make sure I set up the look and feel of my book first. Then I can “Place,” as Adobe calls it, the content in after by pulling in the entire manuscript Word file.

Adobe’s Help System

Lightbulb moments come from my search for tutorials on questions I’ve had. Adobe has an excellent Help system on their site. I like following instructions (that’s always how I built LEGO sets—not into freestyle), so a checklist of steps appeals to me. Sometimes I go find a video lesson, but I do like the self-paced method of going through steps in text.

Master Pages

I discovered Master pages! This is where a lot of your formatting power is in InDesign. Your template is your Master page (or pages—you can have more than one type). Set that up the way you want, add pages, then fill them with imported or typed-in text. I just had to get over doing the bookmaking process “backward.” Do you know how hard it is to wait to design the Master pages and then put the content into see what it looks like?

By following the proper design process, I get to set up automatic things, like the size frame I want to put the content in on the page, page numbers, and running headers and/or footers. These elements are now set, and if I apply that Master to a page or pages in my book, all those things are taken care of. I can also have additional Master pages with different configurations for, say, the first page of a chapter (maybe the page number needs to go at the bottom and no running header).

They are good things, these Master pages. I can now get the basic text of my client’s book flowing properly through the text frames (yes, there are frames for different document parts such as text or image; it’s not already set up as a default text page like in Word).

It has been a long learning curve with InDesign, but the richness of the tools and the ultimate efficiency of the method are definitely worth it to create a professional book design.

After I ran into a misunderstanding for a multi-authored book revision between making changes to content and dealing with formatting, I realized again how Microsoft Word-centric most writers and subject matter experts are, and that I need to take extra time to educate in order to avoid client anxiety and create the best input for me in doing a redesign.

Client Expectations

I’ve been tweaking the content, design, and index of the annual new edition of Ocular Anatomy and Physiology since 2015. Dr. Jan Bergmanson shepherds the project every year, and often asks his colleagues to add additional information from recent research. He also has one of his post-doctoral candidates coordinate any changes to the text and additions to the images (there are a lot of images in the book).

The trouble comes from the fact that I work with a new post-doc every year. My coordinators are really good at ocular anatomy and physiology, but they, like most folks, are used to writing documents in text programs like Microsoft Word. They often don’t realize that the designer will lay out the book in another program (InDesign, in my case). They get confused and anxious when they get a chapter by chapter export of the previous edition from the original PDF into Word and the images are floating around, the page breaks are out of sync, etc.

I know it’s fine because I’ll incorporating just the new changes into the already set InDesign layout, but the poor coordinators often think they have to “format” the Word files after the contributors change or add material, as if the Word file of all the chapters together will be the final product.

Microsoft Word’s Layout Issues

Word is definitely not a good book layout program since it tries to be “helpful” and automatically shifts image locations and keeps changing the page flow depending on what it thinks the printer settings are for a given computer. That’s death by a thousand shifts for the index update part of the project, not to mention the often random moves of images from one page to another. A true layout program like InDesign is the best way to control placement of text and images, for looks and for consistent page flow for indexing.

I’ve written a new introduction email from me for the post-docs and any authors that are working on revisions to a book I’ve designed; I can save the client a lot of time and anxiety by reassuring them that they can focus just on the content (but make changes visible to me) and not on trying to “format” the document.

We can all breathe easier with our roles clearly defined, and I can get on with helping create a great book with my client.