Book Design Made Simple

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You are here: Home / Archives for Book Design / Book Page Design

Book Page Design


Book page designBelow you'll find links to all the information about book page design that’s available on our website, book, videos, and blog.

Get started with Part I of Book Design Made Simple, where you’ll learn how to lease and install Adobe InDesign, create a document, and import your manuscript from Word. Download Part I for free by subscribing to our blog—simply use the form below.

Excerpts from Book Design Made Simple

  • Basic principles of good design: what are they?
  • Front matter — what to include in the front of your book
  • Back matter — what to include in the back of your book
  • Running heads — what to include in your novel or nonfiction book
  • Typeface vs font: what’s the difference?
  • Book trim size: how to choose the right trim size

 

Video tutorials about book page design

  • InDesign basics: navigating, selecting, and using layers
  • Using columns to change your layout
  • Typesetting a poetry book

 

Blog posts about book page design

Below are all the blog posts in the Book Page Design category, starting with the most recent post.

What type size should I use?

January 10, 2022 By Glenna Collett 2 Comments

Graphic showing type sizes for book genres.In Book Design Made Simple, we suggest type sizes that should work in most situations for adult readers. But there are so many other situations! What about children’s books? What about large type books? Reference books? In this article we’ll suggest solutions for these kinds of books. And we’ll only discuss printed books; with ebooks, the reader can enlarge or reduce the type size to whatever works for them. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: children's books, paragraph styles, typesetting

Design a coffee table book

November 11, 2019 By Glenna Collett 23 Comments

coffee table books on a coffee tableCoffee table books. Are they a blast from the past? No, actually, folks are still publishing them, and you can, too. Do you have an idea for a coffee table book of poetry and photography? About a specific artist or a place you love? About your local history, or something completely different? With good planning and design, your book could become very successful. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book marketing, book printing, color, images, text frames

Using a layout grid in book design

November 12, 2018 By Glenna Collett 5 Comments

Layout grid depicted by LegosDo you use a layout grid? A few months ago, I saw a survey on Twitter for designers. The one multiple choice question went something like this:

  1. I always use a layout grid.
  2. I sometimes use a layout grid.
  3. What’s a layout grid?

I had to laugh, but then I began thinking that some of our readers could benefit from learning about this topic. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: text frames

Optical margin alignment

February 13, 2018 By Glenna Collett 6 Comments

quotation marks to indicate optical margin alignmentSome InDesign functions have names that you would never be able to guess, and that makes them really tough to discover and learn. One of these is Optical Margin Alignment (I’m calling it OMA), which is InDesign’s formal name for hanging punctuation. I used to see this effect in other people’s work and then try to imitate it, but I couldn’t because I had no idea what it was called. So this article explains what it is and how to do it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: typesetting

Calculate book page count using word count

January 8, 2018 By Fiona Raven 31 Comments

Calculate book page countWondering how many Word pages equal a book page? You can easily calculate book page count using the word count from your Word document. We’ll explain two easy methods to calculate book page count: 1) use one of our simple formulas as a book page count calculator, or 2) use our InDesign template to experiment with book trim size and type size to accurately determine a page count for books. Use whichever method is easiest for you. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing

Converting multiple images to CMYK in Photoshop

September 11, 2017 By Fiona Raven 12 Comments

Convert to CMYK in Photoshop using batch processingNeed to convert to CMYK in Photoshop? Let’s say you’re designing and typesetting a book with lots of images. You’ve finished laying out all the pages, and your last task is to prepare the images for print. All of your images have either been scanned or photographed, and therefore they are all RGB color (not CMYK color, as required by most offset printers). And most images are JPGs, although you might have a few PNGs too.

It’s a monumental task to convert each image to CMYK individually. Suppose you have 50+ images, or even 1,500+ images! I found myself in this situation recently, and am sharing with you a quick and easy way to convert all of your images to CMYK at once by batch processing actions in Photoshop. (It sounds complicated, but isn’t.) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: color, images, Photoshop

Mixing colors for 2-color printing in InDesign and Photoshop

July 10, 2017 By Glenna Collett 15 Comments

two colors mixed in a patchwork design for 2-color printing

In my previous blog post, I mentioned mixing two colors to use for 2-color printing. So now I’m back to explain how to do that in InDesign, plus how to make a 2-color photo (duotone) in Photoshop. And I’ll let you in on the simple way to make a fake duotone right in InDesign, too.

So let’s start with what we can do in InDesign. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing, color, Photoshop

Devising a color palette for your book

June 12, 2017 By Glenna Collett 4 Comments

Pantone colors for devising a color paletteDo you have a favorite color?

If you’re a designer, I hope your answer is no. Every color can look good or bad, and be valuable or useless, depending on where and how it is used.

In this blog post we’ll help you find colors for your next book project. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: color

Designing a cookbook

January 11, 2016 By Glenna Collett 5 Comments

­­Typical cookbook photoIn Book Design Made Simple, we mention cookbooks a few times but never sit you down and explain in detail how to go about designing one. Once you’ve had some experience with designing and laying out other books, you’ll see at once that you’ll need to apply some extra effort to make a good-looking, readable cookbook. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: text frames, typesetting

Is your image high enough resolution for printing?

August 26, 2015 By Fiona Raven 14 Comments

Is my image high-res enough for printing?How can you determine whether an image file is high enough resolution to use in your book? That’s a question I get asked all the time! Images should be at least 300 ppi (pixels per inch) at the size they’ll be printed at— and that’s where most people need help. How do you figure out the size of an image, and whether or not it’s suitable for printing? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing, images, Photoshop

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Recent Posts

  • Book endpapers: A gallery of ideas July 11, 2022
  • Writing in InDesign: Why and how May 9, 2022
  • Designing a book spine March 7, 2022
  • What type size should I use? January 10, 2022
  • Navigating Amazon KDP ads and keywords November 9, 2021
  • Amazon updates for book authors November 8, 2021
  • What does a children’s book editor do? August 31, 2021

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