Book design: What is it?

Interior book design involves a choice of book trim size, considerations of page layout and typesetting, and production of a book's parts. Although many people use word processing software such as Microsoft Word to produce the text of their manuscript, proprietary book layout software such as Adobe InDesign is necessary for professional book design and typography. For example, pages typeset with InDesign avoid the white "rivers" running through text produced by word processors, justifying text by whole paragraphs rather than line by line so that it flows wth even color.

Cover design of print books consists of creation of front and back covers as well as the spine. Even ebooks need striking front covers. Below is the book jacket for the print version of Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield's Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter, published in 2005 by Kepler Press.

Why is book design important?

Every book, whether physical or electronic (ebook), requires an enticing cover design and an interior design that is a pleasure to read, which together attract readers to open a book and become engrossed.

In Book Design and Production: A Guide for Authors and Publishers, Pete Masterson writes:

There is a tight relationship between what you say and how you say it. The "how you say it" part of the relationship includes the typographic display placed before the reader. Unlike conversation, where facial expression, body posture(s), intonation, and gestures act to enhance (or detract from) communication, when you put words on paper (or as electronic bits to be displayed on a screen), you must make up for the unconscious communication through design, layout, and type.

Book design services: What we can do.

MiddleoftheNight places a premium on such book aesthetics as generous page margins, proportional pages with ample use of white space, beautiful typefaces, and close attention to typography. We are perfectionists when it comes to file clean-up, removing things like extra spaces between sentences and excess formatting codes as well as finessing such matters as letter kerning and page breaks. Most important, we are book-focused, using Adobe InDesign to design, lay out, and typeset your native file format. Contact us for an electronic sample of book covers and interiors we have designed, specifying whether you are interested in cover or interior design, and ebook or print book design.