Preparing Your Manuscript for Typesetting, Part 1

A manuscript you submit to a publisher or literary agent will follow certain guidelines — plain fonts, black text on white paper, no fancy formatting, generous margins and double-spaced lines. Individual publishers have their own preferred submission format, which you’ll find quite easily on their website. Any of these apply when you submit to an […]

Your Book is Great. But Will It Look Great?

For a typical author, it’s all about the content. That’s as it should be. Creating a book of any kind, whether it’s a novel, a how-to, or a travel book, takes a tremendous amount of creativity, thought and hard work. The last thing an author wants to think about, usually, is the mechanics of production […]

Type Says More About You Than You Might Think

I’ve mentioned before that it’s important to choose your typefaces (not “fonts,” which are particular styles, like bold or italic,  of a given typeface) carefully and not simply accept the defaults offered by Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. This goes for your business letters and for your advertising, packaging and signage.

Which Font Should I Use?

When I’m consulting with businesses about the “look” of their corporate communications, one of the hot questions is always, “Which font should we use?” In an earlier Creative Tips post I touched on this subject as far as saying “At least don’t use the defaults” without going into much detail as to how you would decide […]

Just say “No” to these bad typing habits!

There are some things you should never do when typing documents in Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or any other word processing app. Some of these avoidables may be deeply-ingrained habits. Some may invoke a cry of, “But I’ve always done it that way and nobody ever complained!” All of them will lead you down a slippery […]

When it comes to spacing text, more is usually more

By now, if you read the last post, you’re starting to think that designers seems to place as much importance on the spaces around and between things as on the things themselves. And you’re right. One of the great concert pianists of the 20th Century once remarked that what defines a great performer is not […]

Give Me Some Space

Space: it may well be the Final Frontier, because when it comes to documents it’s clear that it was never taught in high school. I think we were only ever flunked on content, and so we fixated on the text and forgot the page it was sitting on. When you write a letter, a proposal […]

Rags to Riches — The Story of a Book Design

This is the story of a book. It starts in a waiting room, where the lady sitting next to me had a spiral bound book on her knee. It looked — it screamed — “home made.” It wasn’t something you’d want to try to read. I couldn’t let it go by without doing something to help, […]