Atlantic Books Today FEATURE
THE ART OF BOOK DESIGN How creative, smart designers make “form follows function” a beautiful thing by Steven W Beattie
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ood design is in the eye of the beholder. Graphic design exists in the service of content. Form follows function. The clichés are many. Like most clichés, each contains a kernel of truth. The specific elements that cohere to make a book pop out among its fellows on a bookstore table are unique to a particular title, and impossible to quantify. No sooner has one made that observation than Andrew Steeves disagrees. He’s the co-founder of Kentville, Nova Scotia, artisanal publisher Gaspereau Press. “I don’t think good design is mysterious,” Steeves says. The statement may come more easily to Steeves than others. The writer, editor and designer has won more than 50 citations for his work from the Alcuin Society, a collective dedicated to the promotion of excellence in graphic book design. Steeves has won so many Alcuin awards that in 2015 he stopped submitting his work for consideration, wanting to give other designers an opportunity. Having developed the cohesive look for Gaspereau’s books—involving type-based cover design on paper jackets (sometimes handmade) and Smyth-sewn interiors—he is better placed than most to demystify the process of book design for a general audience. For Steeves, asking what constitutes good design is like asking how deep is a hole: the answer changes depending on the purpose. While Gaspereau strives for aesthetic cohesion between and among its titles, there is a recognition that each book has unique demands that will be determining factors in their individual designs. A book like Alexander MacLeod’s Lagomorph, an unusual (for Gaspereau) hardcover release with a letterpress-printed jacket and an original wood engraving by Ontario artist Wesley Bates, exemplifies a minimalist design (which won the Nova Scotia Masterworks Art Award) that would be entirely inappropriate for a work like Stephen Marche’s novel Love and the Mess We’re In, a heavily designed 2012 Gaspereau title that included a fold-out map of New York City. Regardless of any specific idiosyncrasies in a given title, the overall significance of good design involves providing a reader with an entrée into a particular work and making the reading experience frictionless, says Heather Bryan, production manager at Nimbus. “The function of good book design is to present the content in such a way that the reader can absorb it with ease,” Bryan says. “Legibility is more important than decoration.” It’s a sentiment Julie Scriver, creative director at Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions, ascribes to.
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