Design

Jen

A Brief Guide to Children’s Book Design

Picture books have evolved over time to serve different agendas, from educational, such as teaching the alphabet, to more “edgy” topics in recent years, such as tackling what it’s like to be a child of divorce. With every change, however, one thing remains consistent: the design of a children’s book must keep a child interested and entice them to turn the page.

Blog_Image_DMS-01

Can I Do Graphic Design?

Graphic design is so much fun. There is so much you can do in this space, just within the context of book publishing alone. From print to digital, there’s no end to what you can create. Because it is such a vast and interesting area, a lot of people want to try it out, but they hesitate because they don’t have any formal art training. I get it—I’ve been there. There is a lot of overlap between art and graphic design, as they require a lot of the same skills and an understanding of concepts like space, color, lighting, etc. But, while having a working knowledge of these when you start is helpful, it’s not required.

Conscious_Book_Design_Denise-01

Conscious Book Design: How to Decrease Harmful Practices and Embrace Diversity

There is an ongoing conversation about conscious editing and how important it is to making great inclusive stories. I would be the first to tell you how crucial it is for books to be edited consciously, as it increases the accuracy and the quality of a book and helps it appeal to a wider audience—something that is very important in publishing. But that is not the only area in book production that has so much to gain from conscious practices, diversity, and different perspectives—design can also benefit from these things.

Blog_Post

The Business of Bookstagram

It’s not just bibliophiles who are making the most of the bookstagram side of Instagram, publishers and other publishing professions have seen the potential of a few great books pictures and are now using them to promote their own brands. But are the Instragrams of publishers as artistic and effective as those of bookstagrammers, or are they doing something different?

Hovley-Blog-Image-1

Designing Book Covers with Genres in Mind

What happens when the book you’ve written doesn’t neatly fit into one specific genre? For instance, what if instead of a book that falls unquestionably into the mystery thriller category, you’ve written one that beautifully straddles the line between personal memoir and war memoir? While this question can certainly influence any number of factors in the book publishing process, it comes into a particularly important light when a publisher begins to develop the marketing plan for a new book.

nature_imagery

Print in Patterns

We’ve all heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but let’s be honest—everybody does. While the cover design on a book doesn’t necessarily make-or-break the sales of every individual book, it is the first thing a reader notices. Before reading the back-cover blurb or looking up reviews online, the reader’s first instinct comes from their impressions of the cover design.