1. Deviant forms - needlessly large, wide and heavy. Books have to be handy. Books wider than the ratio 3:4 (quarto), especially square ones, are ugly and impractical; the most important good proportions for books were and are 2:3, Golden Section and 3:4.
2. Typestting - Inarticulate and shapeless typesetting as a consequence of suppressing indents.
3. Opening Chapters - The opening of a chapter must be marked by a wide blank space above the initial line, by an initial letter or by something distinctive.
4. Title Form - Titles must be accentuated with different type size, etc.
5. Stock colour - White, and even stark white, paper. Highly unpleasant for the eyes. Slight toning (ivory and darker, but never crème)
6. White book covers - They’re about as delicate as a white suit.
7. Flat Spines - The spines of bound books must be gently rounded; if they’re not, the
book will be cockeyed after reading, and the middle signatures will protrude.
8. Large vertical lettering - no need for it, titles on the spine need not be legible from far away so should always be horizontal.
9. Lettering on a spine when thicker than 3mm - No lettering on the spine at all is inexcusable for books more than 3 mm thick. How does one relocate such a booklet? The author’s name must not be missing.
10. Correct use of Caps & Quotation Marks
This was then taken further with 'The Form of the Book Book', by Sara De Bondt & Fraser Muggindge, which take the ideas of Tschichold further with new essays considering book design. We looked into one of the essays inside called Every Book Starts With an Idea: Notes for Designers by Armand Mavis and picked out quotes with relevance to our practise..
The essay discussed how each year thousands of books are published, but whether or not these books are interesting in terms of content or design is debatable. Mevis talks about the stages designers and publishing houses take when producing a book, this is the part I found most important for my current brief as it discusses a process he states as 'linking the content to your concept and the concept to a form'. This gives me a starting point as "All books start from content ... they start with a question" for this also lets me measure my progress through the three stages 'Content, Concept and Form'.
It is commented on how "All of these books have to be designed. Someone needs to decide which paper, type and cover to use" discussing the role of the graphic designer in book design and stressing the importance of how the content must be what is influencing the concept and thus the form.
"You need to dream about the books you would like to design", "Reinvent, to rethink what a book can be". These two points promote innovative design, to challenge what a book is and can be. The essay prompts that theme, it states that you will never see two books the same, that each one is unique. This is one aim for this brief, to produce a solution that is inventive and fresh.
The last point is achieved through the role of the innovative graphic designer. We have to "Express ideas through typography, page layout & structure of info", we "...Juggle these elements to find new combinations" and satisfy our need to create.
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