Composition
I‘ve been laying out all kinds of pages for more than 30 years. Newsletters and journals, marketing materials, monographs and essay collections, technical manuals, trade books, poetry and fiction, graphic novels, text- and workbooks—if it has printed pages, I‘ve probably typeset it. I also have a lot of experience setting foreign-language material, including RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew, though I‘m the first to admit that there’s always more experience to be had and more to learn.
Building beautiful pages is my bread and butter, and I would be glad to bring all my experience to your pages. Let’s make a sandwich.
Design
I guess being a little OCD has its advantages. I‘m happiest when my surroundings are organized—a place for everything and everything in its place. The book designs I like best are similar: clean, efficient, uncluttered, and functional. Designs that invite readers in and ask them to stay a while, designs that guide readers through material without a lot of distraction are the kinds of designs I produce.
The actual layout of pages is key, but color and typeface choices can’t be underestimated. Knowing how your project will print, for example, will dictate tolerances for colors and even shades of grey. If readers have to struggle to read the text or understand a project’s organization because the color or shading I’ve used disappears on a POD printer, then my design has failed at some level. And typefaces…. Well, I once bought a book about designing fonts, and, ironically, I found the typeface that the designer employed to be so distracting that I could never bring myself to read the book. It’s in a second-hand store now.
Consulting
I can’t claim to know everything about page layout, but during my career, I’ve learned quite a bit not only about typesetting best practices but also about efficient ways to get content onto the page, grids that work and grids that don’t, and more. One area I’d like to learn more about is international typesetting. Though I’ve set a lot of non-English text using both Latin and non-Latin scripts, I’d like to learn more about the history and practice of such things as the placement of a period after the descriptor in a numbered list in Arabic, which punctuation marks in French (and Russian and Italian and Spanish) need extra space before or after them and how large that space should be. I make do—and seem to have done pretty well—but I’m always looking for resources (in English; I don’t read French or Russian or Italian and only a smattering of Spanish) that can help me make the best choices for your project.
So if you need to pick my brain about, say, how to do a GREP search in InDesign, pick away. If I don’t know an answer, I’ll find it.