Professional Book Design Makes A Difference

What's between the covers?

Not long ago, I got an email from a friend about her new book of poetry, which she published herself on Lulu.com. The group of friends she contacted were very supportive of her, and her poetry was quite moving. She'd used Lulu's awesome self-publishing service to realize her dream of seeing her words in print, and being able to share her work with others.

It was really great to see.

But one thing kind of troubled me -- the interior design of her work. It was pretty clear she'd used her Word document to lay it out, and it was also pretty clear that she's a poet, not a graphic designer or desktop publisher.

Her words were great. They were truly heartfelt and made an impact. And she used one of Lulu's great covers. But the interior layout of her book left a lot to be desired. It wasn't like she had a lot of typos or sloppy mistakes... there was just something missing in the visual presentation of her book, once you got past the front cover.

If any aspect of book design gets routinely overlooked, I believe it's interior layout and design. Folks pay a lot of attention to writing their book and designing their cover, but when it comes time to lay out the interior, details tend to get skipped, and a lot of opportunity to make a book the best it can be gets lost along the way.

Personally, one of the reasons I've always read, is for the "interior experience," so to speak. I have always found reading to be quite soothing and relaxing -- and I've realized that one of the big reasons is the rhythmic movement of my eyes back and forth across a page. There's actually a physical experience to reading that has always attracted me, ever since I was a young girl, and even more than a cover design, the interior design is what makes or breaks my reading experience.

Things like font family choices. Letter size. The horizontal spacing of the words, so that there aren't too many big gaps between the letters, but they also aren't too close together. One of my favorite books I own, I haven't even read the whole way through (yet) -- but I love to take it off the shelf and look through it, because it's so well designed on the inside. The font size is just right. The typeface is perfect for my tastes, and the layout of the text on the pages is so well balanced, it's barely noticeable.

That's probably what makes book interior design so vital -- and so easy to overlook. The better it's done, the less obtrusive it is. The more efficient and elegant the interior layout, the more invisible it is to the untrained eye. In fact, the best interior book design is pretty much hidden from view.

But when it's not working, you can surely tell.