Templated Design

A lot of publishers, online self-publishing services, and POD (print on demand) services, will offer you design templates for your to-be-published book.

This is particularly likely if your book is to be part of a publisher's series, and you and they want to maintain a consistent look-and-feel throughout the series. So some choices, such as type and basic layout, may already be made for you. This is even more likely to be offered for cover designs with a book series.

Templated designs are also what you will most likely encounter when working with a POD publisher. You probably will have an option to do your own original design, if you choose, but a range of templates will most likely be where you start.

There's nothing wrong with templated design, or using an existing template if it appeals to you. But it's best to avoid just using the template as offered. At the very least, you should personalize your book cover, modify the template, make it look enough different that it looks like something new and original. After all, you are publishing your new and original writings, so having a book cover that looks like a million others rather defeats that purpose.

Series titles do need to look similar enough to each other to be recognized as a series. But what carries the look-and-feel across the series may be the master logo, the titling font, cover art placement and size, and the series title, especially if the series title includes a logo design. Other than that, the cover photo and background color, and some other elements, can be quite different. The series is linked by some key elements staying the same from cover to cover, while others vary.

Within any templated design, expect to be given only a range of choices. For a series, that's no problem. But if you want your book to stand out from the crowd, to be more attractive to and noticed by the reader, you might do well to think outside the proffered box, and either design something that is not based on a template, or hire a designer or design consultant such as myself to help you make those decisions. Really, the most important element of a template is paper size: what is your book's actually printed size going to be? With modern printing technologies, POD or otherwise, that's a blank slate that can be filled many different ways. So don't just settle for what's provided you, do something with it, make it yours. (Of course, as I've discussed before, there are writers for whom the primacy of the word is so powerful that it blinds them to all other aspects of the reading experience, including design. In which case, if all you want is a handheld container for your words, use the template as is. Just don't expect to get noticed by many readers.)

The big publishing houses to whom a writer just hands a manuscript and has no say in the design, the big publishers who maintain their own in-house design staffs and marketing teams—those publishers still exist, but their in-house one-stop paradigm is no longer the dominant paradigm, and is now only one of a wide range of options.

As a writer who is self-publishing, you will have to make at least some design decisions. Get used to it, as it's unavoidable. The more design decisions you keep you hand in, the more of a feeling of controlling your own destiny you will have. Some will dive in and view that as a creative challenge. For others design choices are too terrifying to contemplate; but you must. Yes, all this is a distraction from the actual writing: but every business-level decisions regarding your book that you must make is in the service of the writing, and is intended to support your wallet, so that you can get back to the writing as soon as possible. As a writer who is self-publishing, you must consider yourself to be a cottage industry. You can go so far as to make t-shirts to promote your book; online POD printing is not limited to books, but can include everything from fabric printing to coffee mugs to CDs. It's all available to you. Your only limits as those within your own imagination. (Okay, and stamina. This can take a lot of work to get it all done.)

Since no one else is going to take charge for you, I encourage you do yourself a favor and take charge for yourself. You might be forced to do this anyway, so I encourage you to embrace it as a writer, and do it. Use it an opportunity to learn some new skills and ideas, and as an opportunity for self-empowerment. Treat it as a positive experience, and good luck.

It's a big pond with many fish in it, and some of those fish will insist on viewing you competitively. That can't be avoided, but it also doesn't have to be confronted. Personally, I like big ponds, because I'm not an inherently competitive person; I've always felt that the pond is big enough for all of us, in all our infinite diversity. On the other hand, I'm not a doormat, and don't let people walk all over me. The point here is that you can make your own corner of the publishing world, be happy and do well, and not worry about the other guys.

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On the inside of the book, most publishers will offer only a limited range of typefaces for body copy, usually choosing a "house font" that they prefer most body copy to be set in. This can be a matter of taste. You may be asked to make these decisions; with templated design, you more than likely will.

Different publishers will choose different house fonts, to the point where an experienced designer can pick up a book by a certain publisher and know which typographic specifications are probably going to be used. This is part of how a publisher establishes an identity, the look-and-feel across all the books within a specific imprint.

One approach in typography emphasizes transparency, in which the design and type choices are meant to serve and clarify the text. There are other movements with typography theory, but this basic principle of readability is the one you are most likely to encounter with publishers who use templated design. This approach is exemplified by Beatrice Warde in her famous essay on typography The Crystal Goblet:

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

The basic idea here is that design needs to be "transparent" to content, and not draw attention to itself. The caveat is that bland design draws attention to itself as badly as does gaudy design. The proper vessel for the content is something balanced and appropriate. It can also be elegant and clear without drawing attention to itself, and away from the text.

If, for example, your book is a prose text about history or a murder mystery, one of the classic serif typefaces such as Palatino, Weiss, or Garamond will make your words look classic, orderly, and somewhat elegant. If your book is a how-to manual for computing, an elegant sans-serif font such as Optima might be a better choice, especially if your text is heavily illustrated with examples and samples. The famous serif monospace typewriter emulation font Courier looks just like a 1960s typewritten document, which is ugly for any usage but that one. Helvetica is a great typeface that is overused, misunderstood, and often poorly applied, so I'd recommend avoiding Helvetica except when you really know what you're doing and want that sleek clean Modernist look.

Another significant pole of typographic design is the opposite of what Beatrice Warde advises: when the text becomes its own illustration by pushing past the pure words on the page towards decorative, even "illegible" design. The schools of punk and/or grunge typography are examples; a lot of CD cover designs use "illegible" fonts as art-elements to set a tone of punk attitude, for example. David Carson's innovative design for music and skateboarding magazines such as Ray Gun exemplify this approach. It completely turns Warde's principles of 'invisible design" on their heads. Design like this draws attention to itself, and becomes itself part of the reading experience.

I like both these poles of design. I use what's appropriate for either. I use what I think enhances or illuminates the text, that amplifies the mood or tone or idea in the words. I set no limits on taste or what is acceptable in design, because in every case it's still in the service of the text, of the reading experience.

My idea of typographic "transparency" is therefore that the type should be treated just as illustrations are treated: in ways that enhance the meaning and tone of the text, and augment the experience for the reader. A punk type on a cover design about drug culture, skaters, and rebellious teenagers would be entirely appropriate; the same typeface would be entirely inappropriate for the cover of a jane Austen or Charles Dickens novel. Kerouac, maybe. William S. Burroughs, definitely. Herman Melville, not so much. Use your personal taste, make appropriate choices, and this will carry you a long way towards giving a good experience to your readers.

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Once again, when you POD publish, or self-publish through other sorts of online media, the bottom line is that visual appeal of your book, the fact of its appearance will serve you well. You might have to spend some time figuring out what you really want. You might spend some time playing with the provided templates, till you achieve a good look for your book. It will be time well spent, and your readers will thank you for providing them with a more sensual reading experience than merely blank words on a dull page.

Never underestimate the power of the non-textual aspects of publishing. They can make or break a reading experience.

Don't just use what is given you in the templated design box. Think outside that box. See what you can do, given what options you have. You might have more flexibility than at first you conceived. All of this will serve you in the long run, even if it seems overwhelming at first, and improve your book's chances of being loved by giving your readers as pleasurable an experience as possible.

Getting Back Into Book Design

I'm thinking about getting back into book design work, to offer my services to those authors who have decided to self-publish and self-promote. I think I can provide a useful service that many authors would find supportive, and I am someone who understands their needs because I too am a writer. It is sometimes easier to deal with someone who already shares your interests and concerns. I would be a niche designer offering services to a niche writers' market.


Pleasures of Books

Writers Beware has written about questionable submission guidelines to watch out for. That article prompted me to think that, while it is necessary to be cautious when submitting to journals and publishers you know nothing about, it's perhaps overly easy to become paranoid about such things. It can make one cynical and reclusive, if burned one too many times. While hurt feelings are understandable, they don't really serve you if they linger on too long.

Certainly as a graphic designer I've been screwed by clients. Who hasn't? It happens to even the most highly-regarded and famous. Everyone occasionally encounters a client from hell. There is always a client who decides they won't pay: not because they can't, but for mostly selfish and illogical reasons. Architects run into this as well, as do interior decorators. I've had one or two clients over the years who seemed honest, yet who turned out to be trolls when it came to billing. They count on the fact that they will get away with it because they can afford better litigation than you.

And what artist and designer hasn't had requests from potential clients to use their work, the fruit of their labors, for free? Some requests are phrased as though the asker were doing me a huge favor by asking to use my work for free. The usual argument is that it's more public exposure for one's work, but that's specious: I don't need more "exposure" for my work, I need clients who want to pay me for my creativity. I may not be the best in the business at self-marketing, but neither is this my first rodeo. Most offers of "exposure" assume that one is a rank beginner, just setting out on a career, and that the offered "exposure" will benefit one's career. In fact, most moments of artistic "exposure" will never be seen by anyone who cares to follow through and hire me. The reason they're asking me to use my art for free is that they themselves have no budget. Therefore they are not likely to have a budget for marketing and promotion, either.

I very occasionally say "yes" to requests to use my art for free, for my own reasons—mostly because I take a liking to the person who is asking—but never when the request is expressed in a tone of superiority, as though I should be honored merely to be asked. I am not masochistic in any way, and even the most politely-phrased demands to abuse my good nature and my creative work will be ignored. In fact, my self-esteem as an artist and designer is just fine, thank you. I have no need to have my vanity flattered, nor do I crave attention to the extent that I need grovel for it.

At this time, I don't take projects on for free, on speculation; I require the client to put some earnest money down in order to engage my services. Not much. It's merely a token of honest intent. The amount, usually a percentage of a bid, is flexible and negotiable; but experience has taught that the act of exchanging money makes clients take you and your work more seriously. If they balk at providing earnest token, well, there are plenty of other designers out there they can turn to. You can consider it an initial sorting process. Serious clients only need apply. Dealing with deadbeat clients is not worth my time, so not even starting with them is usually better for me. If you're really serious about wanting my particular work, style, talents, and view, then you'll agree that you won't find that anywhere else. Therefore, the amount of earnest token is negotiable, but the fact of it is not.

Keep in mind: deadbeat and problem clients are a small minority; don't get paranoid, and don't fall into the trap of thinking like a victim all the time. Most clients are honest people who want to be reasonable and fair. You learn to spot the potential problem clients by their behavior and questions early in the process. After that, it's your choice if you want the project is interesting enough to you that you might decide to go ahead anyway. Or not.

These kinds of difficulties happen partly because non-creatives frequently don't understand or value the work that creatives do, out of ignorance as much as malice. How many times have I heard in an art gallery some person remark when looking at a piece of Modern art, "Heck, my child could have done that!" Well, the fact of the matter is, sir, your child didn't. And no, they probably couldn't. Whether or not they could is in fact irrelevant. But this example exemplifies how poorly non-creatives understand the work that goes into making art. At its best this is merely ignorance. At its worst it is willful ignorance, dismissive of the time and effort required.


(A couple of coffee-table special-interest books I designed.)

But partly my desire to get back into book design is rooted in aesthetic self-preservation: there is just so much bad design out there, and so many writers who are taken advantage of, that it seems reasonable to want to do something the situation. Bad designs always outnumber good designs, so whatever trickle of good and effective design I can contribute back into the world of publishing during these turbulent, difficult times seems worthwhile.

I am still recovering from major surgery, but my mind is clear enough today to start thinking about how I would need to set up another website for this, and market it to authors, starting perhaps with the POD people. I'm not capable of taking on a lot of design work at the moment, not till I heal some more, and regain more of my strength. Still it's worth cogitating upon.


Book of Leaves

Books remain for me tangible objects that I enjoy with more than just the sense of sight. There is the texture of the paper and printing, the smell of ink and binding and other materials. The weight and heft of the physical object is part of the pleasure of reading it. A substantial literary effort that feels substantial as an object can enhance the overall reading experience.

What is missing from e-readers such as the Kindle is everything except the raw words, the pure text. Everything else about reading a book is gone. That's not to say that e-readers have no merits. Portability and ease of transport are two such advantages.

Nor do I ignore the truth that many writers have absolutely no care for (or sense of) anything but the raw words, the pure text. Such writers have no visual sense, in my experience, and are "all about the words" to such extent that seems bizarre, so little do they care about anything else. Such writers will find good homes in text-only media such as e-readers. They don't really care. But not all writers are so blind to other aspects of publishing.

Several great poets come to mind as writers who did in fact care about presentation, about the experience of the book as an object, about the multi-sensory act of reading. Federico Garcia Lorca made numerous drawings and illustrations. Walt Whitman was trained as a printer, and for his first edition of Leaves of Grass he chose the paper and set all the type himself. I've done that myself, following in Walt's footsteps, by organizing every aspect of three or four of my published chapbooks, from paper choice to typography to illustrations and logos. I also think of poets such as William Everson, another printer and designer whose small press editions of contemporary poetry are exquisite art-objects beyond being just books. So there is a tradition of writers who care about the book beyond the words.

The craft of the hand-made art book is experience a contemporary renaissance, as is the small handset press and lithograph. Limited editions printed and published by small presses are becoming popular again. Poems published as hand-set broadsheets are far more common now than fifty years ago. There is no need to elegize the death of the published book, despite the turbulence occurring in the publishing world on the national level. New media as well as old are taking up the slack. Each time the death of the book is announced, more books are published art objects than ever before.



So I am thinking about getting back into book design. Perhaps it's folly, and no one will know or care. But it could be fun, and have the side benefit of keeping me connected with poets, writers, and other such creatives who might want to add a bit of visual flair, of typographic elegance, to their best, most publishable work. Consider my doors open at this time.

Hand-Made Art Book, No. 1 (2004)

I recently wrote about making chapbooks of poems, and my interest in making hand-made art books.

In 2004, when I was living outside Taos, NM, I made an art book as a birthday present for my mother. This was one of my first experiments in making a hand-made art book. I made it out of several disparate elements tied together mainly by their symbolic significance for my mother. It was an experimental project, using several different print media, designed to be sensually interesting, made as a gift.

Mom was already having serious Alzheimer's at this point, and I thought long and hard about what to do for her birthday. I wanted to do something I knew she would like, something creative, without being something she would find hard to understand or appreciate. So I made this small art book. Even if she could no longer understand a poem I had written, she would appreciate that I had written it.

The overall theme was travel and pilgrimage, and the book's title ended up being Journey. The book was thought through and assembled in November 2004.



The book is loosely bound with black sewing thread, making a simple two-point sewn binding, pierced at the fold. The cover was a sunprint cyanotype I made on a sunny day at my camper on the mesa above Taos, which I then embossed with leaf imagery using stencils. I signed and dated the book on the inside front cover.



The inside covers consisted of a sheet of translucent vellum printed with gold music notation, symbolizing Mom's long engagement with music as concert pianist and piano teacher. Inside that is a gold-threaded sheet of handmade purple mulberry paper, included for its sensuous colors, and because royal purple was a color that Mom liked. And because I just loved this paper: when laid beneath the gold-printed vellum, it made the gold music notation stand out vibrantly and seem almost like gold leaf laid on purple velvet.





The core of the book is three poems I had written while living in New Mexico, along with collages of photos I had made while traveling around the Southwest. Each center sheet was printed on my printer, front and back in separate passes, then folded in half and leaved together. Also, wrapping the center printed pages was a sheet I made that had B&W photos printed on one side, then on its inside had illustrations and text using scrapbooking materials such as rubber stamps and stick-on letters.



The center spread contains the book's title and colophon, worked into the photo collage that is the heart of the book. It may seem odd to put the book's title and colophon on the center spread, but this is an art book, and you can design it any way that seems appropriate. My thinking here was that the center spread was the book's main point of interest, the spread that would grab you and make you look at it slowly and carefully. So it was the "payoff," if you will, the point of arrival; therefore, it seemed appropriate to place the title there.





The end pages of course are like the front pages in reverse.



This is a one-of-a-kind art book, made for a special occasion. I found it among my mother's papers after her death in 2008, and kept it for my own collection. (I hadn't planned on that when I made it, but life took so many twists and turns in the intervening time that when I found it again, it seemed right to keep it.) During the turbulence of the past few years, between moving house and dealing with chronic illness, I misplaced the book, and found it again a few months ago. Finding it again was another reason I've been thinking about making hand-made books, hand-made paper, and so on.

This book was meant to be a sensual experience, incorporating tactilely-interesting papers, striking colors, poems, several B&W and color photographs arranged in collage layouts, and typography. I set the type as part of each photo collage, combining them in software on the laptop, choosing fonts that seemed poetically connected to the book's theme and content. So some fonts are calligraphic, and others are text blocks like old hand-set type.

(Mom loved the book, by the way. I mailed to her for her birthday, and she phoned me to thank me for it, fairly gushing with pleasure. Which pleased me immensely, as it meant the project had succeeded in its purpose.)

To Self-Publish Again or Not?

I've published circa seven poetry chapbooks over the years. Mostly these were self-published—not out of inflated vanity, but because I had the design, typesetting, and printing skills to do the job myself. I was a professional designer, with access to the necessary tools, so it was not hard to pull off. I even did bindery myself, in those cases.

In the case of those two or three chapbooks that others published, I still contributed typography and design, and/or illustrations. As an artist who does work in more than one medium, I have found that some publishers do appreciate a skillset that lets you give them something finished, which they only have to approve.



I have no problem with self-publishing, unlike some who judge it harshly. Poetry after all has a long history of poets publishing their own works—Walt Whitman is only one example, as he was a pressman and printer, too. The first 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass by contemporary standards would probably be dismissed as "vanity press." But if you have the skills, why not use them in the service of your own art, as well as in the service of others? Copper Canyon Press, which has become one of the premier American poetry publishers, began as a handset press, a cottage industry done out of love; in addition to the many handsome early editions CCP made (I have some in my library), they also contributed to the revival of the beautiful typeface Deepdene, originally designed by Frederic Goudy, which was used to set many early CCP books.

I've also made some specialty little broadsides: color laser-printed, hand-sewn little broadsheet-style diatribes on subjects political and erotic, or both. The three or four longest poems I've ever written have been explicitly sexual and homoerotic; two of these specialty books are chosen from that set of poems—and the content itself assures that some readers will treat it as political.

Mostly I've given these chapbooks and broadsides away. I've donated a few to fundraisers, raising money for causes ranging from AIDS support groups to Hospice care. I've sold a handful, no more than that.


cover illustration for chapbook

I've been talking about doing an art book that is completely handmade by the artist, myself. This past year I've set up a crafts work table and shelves in my basement. I can do all sorts of things there, and I find myself at that table often enough, even if all I'm doing is sorting photo prints. I've been thinking about this art book project more and more. I don't know yet what the contents will be. But that doesn't mean I can't make the paper now, or pre-visualize a book design. The handmade paper may need to be printed with handset type, or calligraphed, rather than printed. I anticipate the finished art book to be another multi-channel creative work, incorporating original text—probably poems—visual art—photography and/or drawings—and decorative illumination.

Hardcore word-oriented folks like some poets of record view all of this "supplementing the text," bas mere decoration, ecause to them the text is paramount, and everything else is decoration. I disagree completely. I am arguing for an equality between media, and equivalent attention paid to each. The design is not mere decoration for the text in an art book. The text might actually arrive last in the process. The beauty of a hand-made book lies in its tactile and visual pleasure at least as much as does in its textual contents. The point is that they should all work together, enhancing and complementing each other.

My question to myself at the moment, however, is: Would I ever self-publish another poetry chapbook? Would I ever bother to make another collection of poems for publication—except perhaps as part of an art book, or other multi-channel piece?



When I was at the Chicago Institute of Art last week, in the Modern section I stumbled across an entire wall full of Jospeh Cornell's little handmade puzzle boxes and curio cabinets. I've been thinking about something similar: a cigar box, perhaps, with a carving or woodburned image on it, then you open it up and find another image or carving, that might continue a narrative; or as with haiku, have two juxtaposed images that comment on each other, and give meaning. I can see some possibilities for a box that reveals both imagery and words when you open it.

Obviously I am self-publishing again: which is one of the purposes of this blog. Obviously I practice multi-channel creative self-publishing, having made at least one short film incorporating text moving across the screen, sound design, and original videography and still photography.

I am not drawn to video-blogging for the simple reason that I don't feel particularly photogenic. I am comfortable in front of the radio or podcast microphone, indeed I have many years of broadcasting experience to give me some self-confidence in my speaking voice. (A rather high-pitched and quiet one, unless I consciously focus and direct.) Rather than video blogging, I am more likely to make short multi-media films, and post those. Another project for over winter, perhaps.

My podcast contains numerous ambient recordings made on roadtrips I've made across the US. One of my favorites of these was a recording of a thunderstorm made one January while sitting on the lip of the Grand Canyon in Arizona: the storm clouds, thunder and lightning, were actually happening right across from me, in the Canyon, while snow and light freezing hail were falling on the truck: Clearing Storm, Grand Canyon Abyss. One short film I want to make will be based around this sort of winter scene, with ambient sounds, and a poem or two.

I'm not really interested in making Personal Statements. The world can fix itself, without my intervention. People label some of my art as political merely because it speaks some sort of truth that they had been avoiding up till now. Disturbing the universe is always a political act, on some level.

I view the art I make mostly as reportage: of states of mind, of places and presences encountered, of states of consciousness beyond the standard solipsistic narcissism that dominates most poetry nowadays. I'd rather convey the experience of meeting fox and ravens in the desert Southwest than talk about my personal problems. Poetry isn't always therapy, or never just therapy. I'd rather present what I've seen, and not coerce you into accepting my viewpoint, and let you make up your own mind. It's not the news of human dramas on the television; it's the "news of the universe," and therefore it often operates on the timescale of the geologic sublime, rather than on a human timescale.

I recognize of course that this is a political stance of sorts, too. But it's a branch of ecopolitics, it has values dating back to the Paleolithic, and it's shamanic. So it deals with the spirits of the land, rather than with my own life-history (except where these overlap). It's also in alliance not with the self-absorbed urban mainsprings of poetry, but with those California poets and photographers of sea and land, such as Robinson Jeffers, George Sterling, William Everson, Gary Synder, and Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

So would doing another chapbook be worth it? I suppose it might be, if I had a reason to. Perhaps a special occasion, or as a gift. For the moment, though, I think the art book project is more inherently interesting, in part because it uses more channels of creativity than the merely verbal. Meanwhile, I recognize that I've never really stopped publishing—but the tools to self-publish keep getting better, too, and more competitive in terms of quality. So who knows?

Doris Grumbach on Book Design

My literary judgment, which I once praised beyond reason, was no longer simply a matter of taste, honed discernment, or the result of wide reading. No, a new and curious element had entered into it: age, and its accompanying ill, poor vision. Someone sent me a new novel that is printed in what I took to be six point Obscurant, a typeface I invented to explain my dislike of the book, not to describe the contents but the size of the type. What was even worse, the space between the words was uneven and thus almost illegible. Taken out of the hands of the fine-press printer and relegated to machine setting, the appearance of the page was unpleasant, affecting my critical judgment, I feared.

The appearance of a book is no longer allowed to contribute to the success of its contents. To the contrary, a good book often gets very little aesthetic assistance from its housing.

So, either I needed to ignore the existence of badly designed books in spite of their useful contents, or shut my aged, critical eyes to their looks and pay attention only to their contents. Rarely is it possible any longer, in these unfortunate days of mass-produced, technologically ugly books, to have both.

—Doris Grumbach, The Pleasure of Their Company, pp. 16-17

Fascinating. It's a pleasure to encounter a writer who appreciates good book design. They're all too rare.

Her second paragraph here is what strongly speaks to me: The appearance of a book is no longer allowed to contribute to the success of its contents. To the contrary, a good book often gets very little aesthetic assistance from its housing. This is what I am talking about, when I complain about writers being too focused on their words to care about good book design, and publishers being too focused on their profit margin to invest in good book design. This is precisely what I am talking about. Grumbach really understands.

Visionary Artwork 2

Journal Pages

Notes working towards a visionary artwork that can be described, articulated, but not contained. Notes jotted down at white heat, to be expanded later, because you really need to run out the door right now but don't want to lose the thought. Notes that might be presented later as notebook verbatim, perhaps as a poetic journal. (A genre that strongly appeals to me, which I practice by default if not always by conscious intent, with my Road Journal.) Also an artistic journal. A photographer's daybooks; an artist's pages. A logbook of transformations.


Calligraphy of the Body

Many pieces of visionary artwork began from photographs of Mystery: often a little blurry, motion-blur or depth of field, as photographs of Mystery ought to be. Motion blur or camera shake seem appropriate places to start, as Spirit is always in motion, always moving, breathing, dancing. Many names for the Divine are verbs, not nouns: Living is dancing. Or Spirit That Moves In All Things. Or The Breath of God moved across the waters. Or the loom of time is Indra's breath.

It's good to start with something a little mysterious in itself. Something that doesn't give you a quick thumbnail answer or narrative. Something that stops you long enough to be contemplated. It's good when it's a little inexplicable, a little hard to capture. (And harder to capture in words than in images.) Catch it by one wing, but don't try to hold it, don't try to pin it down.


water birds 2

Lines from a poem merged into artwork. I don't remember now if the lines came first, or the image was there, and inspired the lines.

the night goes walking like a bird,
bobbing its head around every flame,
filling the spaces in between with dark, shiny feathers

A single image, a little spare when just words. Add some evocative context: imagery, blur, expressive typography, and something greater than the sum of its parts just might emerge.

One weakness I feel most writers have is that they don't think about presentation: the way things look on the page, the proper use of spacing and placement, the best choice of typeface. In other words, design elements. I've been a graphic designer, a book designer, a layout artist, a printer, and I've designed original typefaces. That puts me in very small minority of writers, most of whom in my experience are conscious of none of these disciplines. I know of few poets who are even aware of design, and fewer among those who have set their hand to it.

There are few poetry presses, even, who have done much with book design or illustration; those that have, such as Copper Canyon Press, stand out from the pack. In their early years, they were a small-budget press in which the publisher often handset the type for a book; I have several of Copper Canyon's old first editions, and they are sensual experiences in themselves. Paper, ink, and typeface choices all made carefully, as complementary aspects of the process of publishing. There was a fondness for Deepdene type in those early editions; it's a strong, classic typeface, very good for poetry setting, not well known now or often used currently. This is the sort of thing poets ought to think about, and rarely do. Ugly presentation does your words no good service.



I've done a lot of commissioned cover artwork and illustration for books, magazines, and music albums, and interestingly a lot of that commissioned work falls into the category of visionary artwork. Some have been pieces that were requested by the artist because they had seen an existing piece of visionary art, which they wanted a version of for their publication; this CD cover was one of those instances. (We're getting into nuts & bolts of the business here, and demystifying the artistic process, I know, but bear with me.) When you're an aspiring visionary artist, you might still need to be a working commercial artist, and this project paid a month's rent at the time. Sometimes I also get to do the typography: I often try to convince the client to let me do the typography, as part of the art itself, as this opens doors into a greater potential to be able to integrate art, concept, and type. Just as in a vision-poem piece, the words become part of the artwork itself.


Moons

Follow the blur. Spirit moves too fast for the naked eye to follow. The golden statue at the center of the ring of light, seemingly motionless, is flickering: not moving, or moving so fast, and returning, and moving, that it's too fast to catch, except by the flicker, the blur. The gold streak across the redblue eye of sunset.

Writing in Time & Design

Another required stop in Ann Arbor is Hollander's, in the Kerrytown mall building, next to the farmer's market and only a couple of blocks from Zingerman's. Hollander's specializes in decorative papers, bookbinding supplies, and workshops.



A huge store full of handmade and designer papers, art books and supplies. They teach printing and book-making in the basement classrooms; this is Hollander's School of Book & Paper Arts, with year-round workshops. They have a whole shelf devoted to books on how to make paper, how to make books, binding, etc. A treasure trove for any artist interested in book arts, printing, typography, and their related arts. They even have a small section on brush painting, sumi-e, and calligraphy. It's a dangerous place for someone who loves books, who loves making as well as reading books, and/or who is a paper junkie. I never leave without making a purchase.

This visit, I treated myself to Keith A. Smith's Text in the Book Format, all about the experience of type on the page. Smith, who is a book artist and publisher of how-to books on book arts and typography, talks about the experience of reading, pacing, and space. He writes:

The book format is movement. Rhythms of syllables and moving pictures of implied imagery flowing within text is akin to music and cinema. Events depicted in writing unfold through time in space, alongside the physical act of turning pages.

Awareness of space of the page and composing the pages as well as the text revolutionizes writing styles because it is a departure from the concept of seamless writing of a running manuscript. The writer can take into consideration demands and opportunities of the multiple page format via the computer.

Pacing of the book is the synchronization or syncopation of the content with turning pages. The format can reinforce and even speak aside from the text. Writing specifically in the book format, as opposed to a running manuscript, brings to the reader a book experience.

I don't think writers think about time as flowing very often, which seems short-sighted to me. Reading is a process of reading-in-time, just as music is sounds-in-time, and cinema is images-and-sounds-in-time. Poets in particular, I think, get too caught up with the words themselves, and what they mean or don't mean, and forget all about the medium in which their words are presented: print, type, paper, screen. Poets tend to view words as static, and their poems as objects—more like paintings than cinema. Even the current wave of "visual poets" mostly produce static art rather than moving art. (Vispo is being proclaimed as something brand new and exotic, especially by some of the Language Poets and other mavens of the perpetual avant-garde; but little of it seems particularly new to anyone who's been involved with graphic design, or the history of design and typography, except in that the new computing technologies have made the production of such work ever easier.)

I have been experimenting for some years now with text moving on the screen, poetry moving on the screen as one layer of imagery among others, and of music combined with text and image to make multi-media cinema. This is still a new process for most poets. Most writers focus on the contents alone and ignore the presentation. This is, I believe, true even for concrete poets or visual poets, who still don't think of the entire book as an experience, but only their individual page(s) in the book.

Some of this is the self-centeredness of turf. The writer's goal is often anti-design and anti-presentation, whether they view meaning as central, or whether their purpose is a postmodern questioning of meaning itself. There has always been an uneasy tension between writers and book designers, with writers wanting their text to be paramount, and designers wanting not only to respect that but to enhance the book experience for the reader. Some typography is transparent, some more opaque. Regardless, writers tend to cling to the primacy of their text over all other concerns. The words over everything else.

There's a certain conservative taint to this impulse, even coming from the avant-garde. I've seen more than one poet approve of a published book that was much uglier than it needed to be, in terms of type choice, layout, paper, binding and design, because the poet could only see that the words were legible on the page. They didn't care about anything else. Sometimes poets become so overjoyed that their precious words have actually made it to print that they completely forget about anything else, just as the reader's pleasure, or lack thereof, in the presentation. I have certainly seen enough badly-designed poetry chapbooks that kill the poetry inside by making it a slog to read rather than a joy; that certainly doesn't help the poet's reputation, or make any reader (other than a poet) want to re-read their ugly chapbook.

The amount of bad design, making for an ugly and difficult reading experience, far outweighs the amount of good design. Online, the capabilities of user options in many public meetinghouses and forums such as MySpace and Facebook have set back good design by decades: just because you can include every dingleberry in the universe on your website, doesn't mean you should. online poetry boards tend to be very ugly. A few online literary journals do appreciate the value of good typography, illustration and design; but they remain in the minority.

Just because you can make your own chapbook on your computer, using desktop publishing software and tools, doesn't mean that suddenly you're a good designer, or know anything about legible typography. Just because you can, doesn't mean you know what you're doing.

Keith Smith's series of books are a tonic, and a solution to these problems and issues. I do recommend them. Next time I'm in Ann Arbor, I'll definitely be back at Hollander's, and I'll no doubt be looking at more of Smith's books there.