How to make books
The whole week before and during non-fiction, the main book fair of the year, discussing how to create books. Today graphic designer tells what the fonts are, how to create a cover, and that book is almost like home.
How to start work
The book is like meeting with a stranger: a closed story in which you need to gradually discover and understand it. And themes can be quite similar. Or too complex. Or very thin. For example, art books. Happen, making an album of any artist, you take the album for another artist. And now, making another book, you see that they continue an old book the last of the artist because no key was found.
All must come from inside the material. There is no way that you sat down and came up. You can think of in the process when you already started something to understand and discover. What are the specifics of the author is, what its features, what it fails, what fails? From this concept depends on the selection of design elements.
The book requires an adequate understanding of space. How to work in it, how to equip it? It is the same that equip the apartment. How to make the bedroom and living room, and an office. The main thing — to understand a new topic and make it very close to live there for some time.
About the process
Sometimes start to gain headlines, words, and looked at them. This helps to visually understand and feel the material. Combinations and rhythm, the nature of the letters. If you already have the illustrations to look how they behave on the strip that they offer. The next stage is when you work with text and pictures. Looking at field margins, on how this visually works and corresponds in scale. Here are involved your artistic abilities.: what a picture of how to put what text with what. Sometimes you start to scream and tell the compiler or author (if it is someone alive, not Dostoevsky): “Hey, maybe some here, tip? And don’t want to add an epigraph? Let’s think together.”
About skins and fonts
The cover is a sign. Cover, which loses its signification, which is only informative, it looks bad, it is not visible to the viewer. If you just put on the cover of a piece of text, one such cover in hands will not take. It must be some kind of task, that it wanted to read, to see what’s inside. Is visual communication. You are trying to convey the message of the book, and the reader needs to understand and decipher. However, such cover is not omnivorous. They are designed for people who are interested in life.
The time is changing. In our life firmly screen: of course, it affects the book. The font is a picture — possibilities of typography, typography became much wider. Lines, letters can stand very close to each other. They can make noise to face, on the contrary, to push each other. They can create a very different mood: harmony, tranquility or fear. The capabilities of the font are enclosed in its transformation. This is the Silver age. Today font has learned to behave differently. In the book, in the chart, it can pulsate, move, escape — as on the screen or in a city is.
This is very different poets. What to do with the covers of their books? I thought the cover should be the verses. And how do these verses to gain? Slightly different fonts, consonant with the size, sound of the verse, by the master. Each font their capabilities. The grotesque creates one situation: he’s tough, determined. Antiqua is quite different: the classic, nuanced.
Here in the book, used a classic font, thoroughbred and sublime, with fine serifs. This font is exquisite, clear lines boldly stand on the page with poems. I chose a modern solution and made the cover of poems that begin at the spine, and then move on to the cover and trimmed at the other edge. This is only part of the sentence, but they really cut into the book: I want to open and start reading. Now we are preparing the next collection, and he wants a quiet and modest cover with a simple title. That is like those covers of the Silver age. This desire is dictated by the author’s attitude to his poetry that goes back into the past. They are not modern, they are about eternal. Although in this sense, and modern.
On how should look like a modern book
If we talk about the book as about the contemporary subject, it’s not about the products that we see in today’s stores. These colorful books say with the future reader in the language of the 1970-80-ies. The book is a single organism which, like any other thing, has its thought-out from beginning to end the design.
At European fairs and festivals, you can see the books very unexpected contents. It’s a totally different level of relationship to information, to what to read and what to watch. We are mainly published translated literature, that is well-executed from time to time.
The author gives these books to his friends and complains to me: “the First thing they say: “Oh, how a well-made book”. And I wanted to file it correctly. The younger generation does not know this wonderful person, artist, photographer, and writer. I wanted to make the book modern and bright, so it drew the attention of this audience. The book is called “Ragtime”. This is an old text, which is appended and changed. The time that they are, in a sense, torn apart: the texts are dated, and look at the epoch special. Therefore, the inscription on the cover is torn in half. In one volume, half of the word “Ragtime”, in the second volume the second. Together they are made into a single spectacle. It’s large font and bright color.
About the artists and readers
Sometimes say, “Oh, what fine print”. Take the sunglasses and font size normal. Judgments are hasty and not very accurate. The book should be a certain order, and this is very important for communication inside the publication. Experienced artists often find the right track. Sometimes, the artist wanted to do effectively and have lost the clarity in navigation.
Reader — a free man. He even thought to buy the book. Just went about his business, walked up to the collapse, sluggish looked at what is sold there. And suddenly something stopped him there and hooked. And he pulls his hand and takes it. This is exactly the situation when running a visual component. But at book fairs the number of books there is a feeling that anything is not necessary and not desirable. Because they are so many that do not want to choose.