Today’s Plan:
- Design Theory: Page Layout
- Design Theory: Typography
- Design Theory: Book Design
- Design Theory: Thinking Avant Garde with E.E. Cummings
Design Theory: Golden Ratio, Grids, and Page Layout
I want to begin by introducing what is known as the Golden Section or the Golden Ratio, a fundamental concept in page layout. I have already asked you to examine some books and take measurements on their pages, paying attention to margins. Today we are going to drill down a bit more to discover some basic formula, tools, and systems for designing a page.
Golden Section, Grids, and Page Design
First, I wanted to discuss the Golden Section, a system for determining proportion that is one of the fundamental principles of graphic design. I’ve assembled a few articles:
- Steven Bradley, How to Use Golden Section Proportions in Page Design
- Designing on a Grid
- Short Advertisement on Grids
- A 35 minute video tutorial on using Grids in InDesign
We will try that tutorial on Thursday, and then work in InDesign to create a master page layout for your book (so you should have a concrete sense of page dimensions by then–at least in inches). We might need a calculator to help us transform inches into points.
Design Theory: Golden Ratio and Typography
Just as the Golden Section can inform layout, it can also help determine typography. As we will discuss below, typography concerns more than just font size or font type–it also concerns line height, line length, margins, and more. We have to factor all of these into our design.
Chris Pearson has an excellent, comprehensive article up to explain how the Golden Ratio can be used to adjust line height to font size, including a chart. The article also contains a link to Pearson’s useful typography calculator. Though designed for the web and pixels, I think we can use this to determine some base font sizes. Doing so might require we convert pixels to points.
Production Concepts: Basic Book Design
We’ve spent the last few weeks working on InDesign and the technologies we need to produce a book. Now we need to think a bit more about the conceptual elements of a book, down to the nuts and bolts. Before we can design our pages, we need a better sense of what has to be designed! So I turn to a wikibook on Basic Book Design.
This book contains short chapters on:
- Characters per line, suggests 65-70
- Leading: space between lines of text, spacing, line-height (note that leading is usually more than font size)
- Justification
- Page Size
- Margins
I will ask you to consider all of these things as you design the master page in InDesign for your poems.
Next Level Typography: The Work of EE Cummings
I have one final wrinkle for your book design–and that is that you do something interesting typographically. Interesting is intentionally ambiguous here; as I say in my writing classes, anytime someone uses the word interesting, they aren’t done thinking yet–or they could use more precise words that explain *why* something is interesting.
I’m leaving that up to you. But I wanted to share some “interesting” ideas.
First, to the poet E.E. Cummings (1894-1964). Cummings was a modernist poet who took interest in the typographical dimensions of his poems. Let’s read the introduction to one of his masterworks, “Is 5.” Let’s look at some of his poems.
Of course, Cummings was in some part limited by the technologies of his day (the typewriter). What other experiments or elements could he play with today?
Davis’ Breaking Up [at] Totality.
a href=”https://www.google.com/search?q=Interesting+book+typography&espv=2&biw=1276&bih=682&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz-ZL94p_LAhVFJR4KHS6lA2sQ_AUIBigB&dpr=1″>To Google for typography.
I ask that your book establish a pattern that plays with typography, layout, etc. in a way that distinguishes it from other books and helps it stand out among the crowd.
Homework
Work on your project. We will be working on page layout with the Golden Section on Thursday–likely doing the tutorial above to set up a master page in InDesign. But I also want you to have some kind of sketch for page design.
