Book Design

For theBookDesigners I typeset the interiors of print books in InDesign, while collaborating with the illustrious Ian Koviak. Each title starts from an approved sample layout, and master pages plus paragraph and character styles carry that design through the full manuscript. The work covers body text, front matter, back matter, and pagination. That’s the full set of pages that turns a manuscript into a finished, readable book.

The spreads here are from Alice in Evermoor by Karen Huss, 326 pages with its own chapter ornaments and small flame drawings set into the text.

Not every book is wall-to-wall text. On the image-heavy ones the layout is most of the job: which photo bleeds across the gutter, how the type wraps around it, and what keeps a long book feeling like one book from the first page to the last.

Waterman 2.0 layers action photos over soft washes of color. Get Your Heart On is loud, black and white, and full of hand-lettering. Airliner Models runs decades of model planes across wide landscape spreads, tied together by a recurring circle. Ape Anatomy and Evolution fits detailed anatomical plates, charts and captions into more than 450 pages.

A print layout doesn’t become an ebook just by exporting it. For A.M. Peterson’s Yacht Boy adventure series, Shakedown Cruise and Sea Dog, I took each finished print interior and reworked it to ebook standards: even margins, standard font sizes, images sized to hold up on any screen, and every illustration checked against the text it belongs with.

Both books reflow to whatever size the reader picks, with their fonts embedded, their drop caps intact and an interactive table of contents, and I tested them across a range of screen sizes before they went out. I also adapted the covers to ebook dimensions.