The Essential Things to Design Your Printed Book’s Content
“I have seen too many books with great covers but horribly designed content. It’s like great packaging, but when you open it, the food inside looks brown and boring. It may still be nourishing, but my appetite is gone.” -Erik Spiekerman
Have you seen a book with a great cover but the content design let down your expectations? Or a book with an interesting cover and charming content but low readability?
In designing a book’s content, we have to consider some essential aspects that affect the convenience of the reader and the way we deliver the writer’s message from the book. Hence, we need to research about how to achieve the goals and how the readers are interested to read. Based on research, we can identify the suitable design style for the contents and start to implement the style into a template. Here are some aspects to consider when you make the template:
- The format
Make sure the paper size, bleed, margin, paragraph spacing, trim size and typography fit on the publisher’s standard.
2. interior Components
To improve the readability of the book, we should add some necessary interior components such as:
- Running heads
Running head, known as page header is a line at the top of a page that provides important information for the readers. It can be the book’s title, chapters information, etc.
- Footer
footer is a line at the bottom of a page that provides supporting information that is not included in the header. It can be the page number, illustrations, etc.
- white space
White space or negative space is basically a space with no text and draw to make an interesting view. This would help you to highlight several parts of the book and avoid boredom for the readers. When designing the book’s interior you have to make sure the space between the layout, the margin and highlighted content already fit the portion.
- Chapter
A chapter is a section of a book that helps the readers to understand the book’s structure, usually end up with a page break or space followed by a new chapter with a number or title. Chapters give readers a space to pause reading after a long work.
- page number
a sequence of numbers (or letters, or Roman numerals) that applied to the pages of a book or other document. Using Indesign, you can set automatic page numbers with some different forms (roman numerals or alphabet).
3. Signature details
Every book has its own uniqueness. By adding a small customised detail for the book’s signature, the book becomes unique. This detail will make the design stand out and attract the readers to dive into the book. You can put the signature detail on the running head or footer or the beginning of chapter.
Those are 3 essential things you need to know to design a book’s template. If you have any comments or suggestions please drop in the comments section below. Thank you for reading, follow me for more tips!
