“Web design is 95% typography,” and the type that designers choose shapes how we experience the web. Several people have asked lately about how to tell which font is being used on a website. Here are two ways–one slightly technical and one fairly simple: Slightly technical: The “Inspect Element” tool Buried in your browser is […]

This article is in: Book Design, Design, Type Design, Typography, Web design

A book’s cover is a promise about what the reader will find inside. For example, this cover for Treasure Island promises, “I will be boring and badly designed.” A book cover is a promise Books that don’t have cover art get automatically generated covers–these covers don’t quite do justice to the swashbuckling going on inside the […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Community, Cover Design

I was recently asked what the best font would be for designing material for kids who are learning to read. The truth is that the best font for kids, or for anyone, is always going to depend on the context. Readability is relative Readability in a font has a lot to do with what the […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Type Design, Typography

A #shelfie of the books we’re reading in our house–some for me, and some for the kiddos. The International Day of the Book The 23rd of April is celebrated in many places as the International Day of the Book, or World Book Day. UNESCO declared April 23 to be World Book and Copyright Day as […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Community, Ideas, Social Media, Travel

Market is primed for “readerless books” After seeing the growing interest in driverless cars, I’m designing a new line of readerless books. I think the market is ready for an innovative solution like this. Imagine the time saving potential–a book that sits quietly in a corner and reads itself! These books are virtually indistinguishable from […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Ideas

Why read books? Books take us beyond ourselves and give us access to experiences, thought and wisdom that we could not otherwise reach in our short time.

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Ideas, Illustration

“A chart showing the percentage of excellence in the physical properties of books published since 1910.”
Infographic c. 1920

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Illustration

A friend returned my copy of Ivanhoe last week. They had moved to another city and this little volume (about 4″ x 6″, 670 pages) had been packed away in one of their boxes for almost a year. It was funny how glad I was to see it again–I hadn’t been looking for it and didn’t […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books

When you study something intently, you sometimes lose sight of what made you want to study it. When readers begin paying attention to a book’s design, it is usually because the design is getting in the way. For better or worse, the words of the Bible have been studied and parsed and dissected to an extraordinary degree. […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Design

As a parent teaching my kids about letters, it’s sometimes difficult to know which A to focus on.  What is the Platonic form of the lowercase A?  It may also be an occupational hazard that I want to tell them about serifs and italics and the difference between a two-story “a” and a one-story “a.”  And […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Community, Design, For EMM, Type Design, Typography