Tony Brown, Tatiana Balykhina, Ekaterina Talalakina, Jennifer Bown, and Viktoria Kurilenko
Georgetown University Press
Mastering Russian Through Global Debate is the second in a series of eight books, only one of which will be in English and almost half of which will be in a writing script other than Latin. Talk about trial by fire! The project is designed for advanced language students and encourages them to increase their language proficiency by debating topics of global interest—the environment, poverty, and so on. The content is similar throughout the series, but it’s not a direct translation from book to book; the topics are flavored by the culture of the language under study.
One of the things that most intrigued me about the series is that the design had to be able to handle Latin, Cyrillic, Han, and Arabic scripts without major template changes. The leading, for example, had to be large enough to accommodate Arabic characters—some of which have long ascenders and descenders and crowded diacriticals—but not so large that the Latin and Cyrillic broke apart. Small caps is nonexistent in Han and Arabic, so I had to avoid using it to distinguish heads—a trick I rely on a lot for Latin-script designs. I chose fonts that included full complements of Latin and Cyrillic characters and that would coordinate well with the specialized fonts that would be needed for the Arabic and Han. Let’s take a look at some of the challenges and how I resolved them.
The authors for this project originally created the tables and figures that you see in Figure 1. They also thought far enough ahead to build them in InDesign rather than Word. That proved to be quite a time saver for me. Unfortunately, they built the graphics before we had a template, so the fonts in the tables and figures didn’t match those in the design. I also was not sure that I could count on the fonts they used to have the extensive character set we’d need. Making matters worse, the graphics were not sized to fit the design’s page grid, so simply resizing their original tables and figures would lead to unacceptable font-sizing and line-weight inconsistencies. To get around these issues and ensure we would have a consistent look, I designed a “base model” for each of the table and figure types, making extensive use of paragraph, character, table, cell, and object styles (and keyboard shortcuts!). I copied each source graphic into my template, resized it to fit the design grid, applied the correct combination of styles, and made any final tweaks that the styles didn’t pick up or couldn’t account for. I also took the opportunity stabilize some other inconsistencies that had slipped in among the source tables and figures along the way.
In Figure 2 you can see another kind of table that I had to rebuild; the books include about six table designs. Some are applied more or less randomly, and others are used only for specific features of the text. This spread shows a couple other features of the series that are interesting, too. First, it offers a good example of how each book is localized to the culture of the language under study. You can see four photos of Russian dignitaries on the spread and a quote from each of them. In the corresponding Mastering English Through Global Debate, American presidents and their speeches or writings provide the source material for this section. Second, you may have noticed the orange icon in the last line of the recto. The series actually includes two icons that are peppered throughout the text like this. This icon indicates that an audio file is available for the lesson. Sometimes the icon sits above a head; at other times—as here—it sits within a line of text. I designed one icon to work in both formats.
It’s often the case that activity-based books like those in the Global Debate series have lots of lists and sublists and write-on lines. The verso page shown in Figure 3 shows a couple examples, but the books contain many more. The design includes around 120 paragraph styles, many of which are list variations. You’ll also see—on both pages of the spread—a trick I used to make level-1 heads easy for students to locate. The blue square to the left of and blue rule above each level-1 head indicate where the major sections of each chapter begin, and because the blue box hangs into the left margin, the heads jump right out. I created the structure using InDesign’s Rule Above and Rule Below features. What you’re actually seeing is a very thick blue rule extending across the page but partially masked out by a slightly less-thick and slightly shorter white rule. I’ve used this technique to great effect in a number of projects, but it does have its limitations. It would have been nice to have rounded the corners of the box, for example, but in the interest of efficiency and time, the squared box is a compromise I accepted.
On the recto, you see a chapter opener. Some chapters include early on a large number of photographs, so I had to restrain the size of thematic images like the one you see here. Ensuring that we had adequate space for chapter titles—the length of which will vary pretty widely from one language to the next—was also a high priority. And in order to maintain a connection to a theme that the cover designer initiated, I picked up the talking bubble and circuit-board image in my treatment of the chapter number.
I’ve included the spread shown in Figure 4 primarily to show how I resolved the problem of a very large table that had to cross the spread. Each book will include this rubric, but because the length of the text will vary from language to language, I couldn’t set it tightly; it had to be flexible. I tried leaving the gutter column white, but the table looked too interrupted. It felt almost like two tables. Instead, I decided to colorize the gutter column so that it continued the pattern established in rest of the table. The consistency of treatment helps the column to disappear without breaking the table.
In addition to the main text, each book is accompanied by an answer key (Figure 5) and an audio companion. The designs for the two are almost identical and are quite straightforawd with few bells and whistles. Both ancillaries are delivered as PDFs on the publisher’s website and will be printed by readers. For that reason, I designed them at 8½ × 11-inches—the paper that most readers would have available for printing. Other than using a larger trim size, I picked up a few elements from the textbook design to unifity the package.