Introduction / Table of Contents

Welcome to my design scrapbook. Entries are arranged by book, with examples of various good and bad design features in each. You can browse through as normal, or use this contents page to navigate.

Athfield Architects, Julia Gatley – bindingbinding, chapter heading, colour, cover, format, half title, hierarchies, images, index, jacket, margins, measure, paper stock, part title, text, title

Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning, Jennifer Hay et al – binding, colour, cover, images, jacket, margins, paper stock

Bitterblue, Kristin Cashore – chapter heading, cover, half title page, images, part title page, title page

Briefcase, John Adams – binding, colour, cover, images, paper stock

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett – colour, cover

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, JK Rowling – images, imprint, text

The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate, Joy Cowley and Jo Davies / Joy Cowley and Sarah Davis – book shape, book size, colour, cover, format, images, text

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (ebook) – book size, chapter heading, colour, cover, ebook, format, measure, paper stock

Newtons Sleep, Daniel O’Mahony – chapter heading, cover, half title page, headers and footers, measure, part title page, title page, text

The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary – binding, book size, headers and footers, margins, measure, paper stock, text

Paper Blossoms, Ray Marshall – book size, book shape, colour, cover, format

Pat the Zombie, Aaron Ximm and Kaveh Soofi – binding, book shape, book size, colour, cover, format, images, text

Radical Skubic Jewelry – binding, colour, cover, images, margins, measure, paper stock

Reflections of a Solitary Hamster, Astrid Desbordes - text

The Selected Works of TS Spivet, Reif Larsen – imprint, text

Spineless Classics – binding, book size, book shape, images, measure, text

There was an Old Woman, Gavin Bishop – binding, book shape, book size, colour, margins, paper stock, text

The Unforgiven Harvest and The Lead Wait, Jo Randerson – colour, cover, headers and footers, hierarchies, images, margins, part title page, text, title page

I am also doing an ongoing study of NZ YA Covers in 2011, which can be found here. I hope to continue updating this through the year as and when I have time, and perhaps do a follow-up for 2012 releases.

BITTERBLUE, Kristen Cashore

This is a beautiful book with gorgeous design. The jacket cover is fairly generic-YA-fantasy, but hidden inside are some of my favourite bits of design in this whole scrapbook.

TRENDS IN 2011 NZ YA FICTION

Inspired by Kate Hart's intense study of the covers of American YA titles released in 2011, I have done far less work than Hart and looked into the covers of NZ YA released last year. Hart had 624 covers for her study; I have 25*.

I decided to determine whether any trend in colour schemes could be found in 2011's YA covers. I worked out each cover's dominant colour by the scientific method of eyeing it up, and sorted them along a rainbow graph. The results are ...

Well, it looks like we're still keen on the traditional shades of tan, but blue is by far and away the most popular colour for book covers. 

*If you notice I've missed one, let me know!

FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM, JK Rowling

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a companion to the Harry Potter books. It purports to be Harry’s copy of the book, and contains a variety of annotations and doodles ‘written’ by him, Ron and Hermione. The annotations are handwritten - a normal typeface really wouldn't work for this sort of feature.

As this is a textbook, not all of the additions are relevant to the text...

THE SELECTED WORKS OF TS SPIVET, Reif Larsen

This is a highly annotated and illustrated book, the idea being that the narrator has supplied the reader with a great deal of information additional to the main text. This extends to the preliminary material, where the book’s Subject metadata has been set out as though they are the character’s notes inserted into the imprint page. This is a clever touch, as it ties in with design elements used throughout the rest of the book to put a bit of interest in a page not many readers would ordinarily look at.

REFLECTIONS OF A SOLITARY HAMSTER, Astrid Desbordes

This book's text is very interesting: it is not set in a typeface, but has been hand-written by the designer. Tiny differences in the lettering give it an organic feel suited to the cartoonish illustrations.

JANE EYRE on the KINDLE APP FOR ANDROID

The trouble with e-book design is that quite often, it’s not the e-book’s design you are seeing: yes, formatting errors can make a book unreadable, but if an e-book is cleanly formatted and has no or few images, then, depending on your reader, you can practically redesign it yourself.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle app on my phone. It’s not ideal to read from: the screen is small and back-lit, and I’m forever bumping the screen the wrong way and having to scroll back to my place. Nevertheless, the app provides quite a few options for redesigning an e-book’s text to better fit your device.

Some design elements are immovably formatted into the e-book. For this version of Jane Eyre (which I ‘purchased’ for free from Amazon), these include the cover, line and section breaks, chapter headings, and indented paragraphs.

Jane Eyre, all alone in my Kindle library