Ocreations knows Book Design.
From first time authors to established novelists, we can help you design the next best seller!
Q: What exactly is Book design?
A: Book designers are professional designers able to anticipate the needs of authors for graphic design and publishing for communication.
Contact Ocreations for Book Design
The value of hiring a professional book designer
Our graphics department can match the personality and feel you would like your book to convey to a potential reader. We can anticipate all the technical needs and professional standards of transforming your book from a text document into a publishable book.
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01 – Book designers, graphic designers and publishers
- Book Designers are not simply graphic designers nor are they publishers. Publishers work for the readers but book designers work for you, the author. Book Designers at Ocreations care about properly representing you and your book’s content from the design of the cover to the readability of the interior pages.
Book designers do indeed use graphic design in the process of collaborating with authors but unlike other designers, Ocreations possesses additional skills and experience that the average graphic designer will be unfamiliar with. The process of preparing a manuscript for printed publication is highly technical and requires familiarity with a variety of very specific technical rules.
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02 – Correctly designing books with margins & grids
- Correctly sized margins for a book are specific to each book size and affect how you hold and read a book. The placement of words on the page in contrast to the margins is based on understanding the physical aspect of where the reader will place their thumb and how their eyes move across the page.
Because the paper pages of books are thin enough to see through, a “ghost image” of the words on the back of the page can ruin the reading experience. Pick up a few books and hold the pages up to the light. You will be able to see the results of a properly designed book when your reading experience is not disrupted by the words on the back page. This is the result of knowing how to use the baseline grid properly. If you can see the words on the back of the page, you can tell the book was not designed by seasoned professionals.
As book designers, Ocreations knows how to establish and adhere to the baseline grid – one of the many secrets of good book design.
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03 – Ensuring text legibility & readability
- Ensuring text legibility and readability in long form texts such as novels is based on understanding how people’s eyes move around a page. Turns out that a reader’s eyes will become fatigued after staring at a page full of too many words for too long. There are special tactics good book designers will use to break up a page in the right places for specific audiences. The eye endurance for a senior reader is different from that of a middle-aged person, a teenager and a child.
As professional book designers, Ocreations is intimately familiar with the standards for legibility & readability. We know the rules and the appropriate methods to use when designing books.
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04 – Building cross-references correctly
- Now that the era of print has been inextricably bound to the digital world, there are new rules for how to properly create cross-references, a table of contents and interactive elements in books.
Indexing every page properly, page coalition and page numbering manually might be ok for a 10-page brochure, but when designing a book there is a greater need for accuracy that does not allow room for human errors, especially when dealing with textbooks or manuals.
Consider how an author might have a citation on let’s say page 120, and then a few revisions later we end up moving that citation to page 121 (just 1 page down). Now every citation and cross-reference that came after that change also needs a revision!
As book designers with high standards for technical manuals and textbooks, Ocreations knows the methods and rules for dealing with accurate page numbering and cross-referencing.
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04 – Designing books for print and digital
- When books are designed to modern standards, we employ very specific tactics to make sure they look, work and read the same on all editions. The digital book editions should match the printed book editions and this requires a professional understanding of ePub coding and HTML.
As book designers with a clear understanding of both print and digital editions, ocreations knows how to transition your book over to ePub and digital book formats.
