![]() ![]() ![]() Today, with the huge variety of free and paid fonts available, it can be a challenge to start designing a book. “… no matter how well a narrative arc is resolved and how enthralling characters are, if the book’s layout isn’t good, the reader may be tempted to put it down in the first chapter.” What happened was that poor Doctor Zhivago was a victim of bad layout options. ![]() Was Pasternak a worse storyteller than Dostoievski? Probably, but that’s not the point. We can also speculate here that the myriad of Russian patronymics were too much for me, but that didn’t bother me at all when I read a more modern, better-conceived edition of “The Idiot” that lived on the bottom of that same shelf. Today I’m sure I never finished the copy of “Doctor Zhivago” that sat on my parents’ bookshelf because the font was so tiny and poorly chosen that it created a dense, unpleasant block of text. I still didn’t know that, no matter how well a narrative arc is resolved and how enthralling the characters are, if the book’s layout isn’t good, the reader may be tempted to put it down in the first chapter. When I first learned to read I did not realize that part of the ease with which I turned page after page of my first “grown-up” books, the ones with flowing text and no images, was due to the quality of the typesetting-a light grid with nice leading and kerning, well-planned margins and, above all, good typography. “Books were my favorite objects long before I dreamed that one day I would design them.” In fact, I loved books even before I could read them (that smell of ink and paper!), but it was the discovery of reading-that alchemy of letters coming together to reveal words, unravel sentences and tell stories-that transformed THE BOOK into the holy of holies for me. Books were my favorite objects long before I dreamed that one day I would design them. I did not know the secrets of good typography, but I was aware of the mysterious power of a good story. Before I was a designer I was already a reader. ![]()
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