At Hyphen, projects are in the works for many weeks before a designer gets involved. There’s no point designing a book around a manuscript that hasn’t been written yet, otherwise we’ll have all kinds of unanswerable questions: How many words are there? How many chapters? What kind of breakouts are there? How many images do we have? And the list goes on.

Once we have a draft of the manuscript, and we know more or less what we’re working with, we can start the design process.

Breaking it down

The concept stage is all about nutting out the types of elements that will appear throughout the book. The best place to start is by scanning the manuscript. The concept needs to demonstrate how we’ll treat each element, so our client is left with no surprises when it comes to layout.

Before building the text styles we consider roughly how many words will be on each page. Dividing the page numbers by the word count gives us a rough estimation. From here we know our limitations with font size and free space for images and white space.

Once we have the logistics down, it’s time to consider style. Often this will be heavily influenced by the client’s brand guidelines. It’s important to honour the brand’s identity, and it’s equally, if not more, important to showcase something new that highlights the significance of the client’s milestone. It has to feel like them, and it has to feel special.

Inspiration comes from all around! An obvious place to start is the client’s archives. Looking at old branding, images and products can all inspire the style of the design. Scanning the internet is also great. Sites like Pinterest, Behance and BP&O are useful for building mood boards. If all else fails, a walk down to the local book shop does the trick.

Building styles

Once we have an idea of the scale and general vibe, we start building elements. We ask questions: Which fonts will we use and at what weights and point sizes? How do the elements complement one another and create a hierarchy? What type of graphic elements can we introduce?

Once the text has been styled, we print out a page at 100% scale to make sure it’s legible and balanced. From here we build out an example chapter, using text from the manuscript and adding pull quotes, graphics and photos. We also provide the client with a couple of cover concepts and a design for the end pages. As far as we’re concerned, white end pages are a missed opportunity.

Once the text is in and the layout is looking right, we then replace all text with placeholder text. This ensures the client is focused on what’s important: the design, not the words.

Internal review

Before the client sees the concept, it goes through a round of internal review. This is a good opportunity for the editor and project manager to add their expertise and knowledge of the project. They may have helpful insights like ‘This breakout should be treated differently to this other breakout’, or ‘Part 1 of the book is more image heavy, we should show example spreads where there are less images,’ etc.

These fresh eyes and new perspectives are super helpful at this stage and help us ensure the client sees the most realistic version of their concept.

Expect the expected!

Working out all the parts at this stage ensures nothing comes unexpected. The more thorough a concept design is, the less design changes we encounter down the track. It’s much easier, and might I add, cheaper, to update ten pages worth of content than an entire book’s worth.

All the work finally comes to fruition when we show the client the concept for the first time and talk them through it. This is the moment when a client can suddenly imagine their book – when it goes from theoretical to real – and it’s incredibly rewarding. We can always tell when we’ve nailed it from the looks on their faces.

– Jane Heriot, Junior designer