On Having a Great Spine August 18, 2017 – Posted in: Book Design

One of the most critical components of a book’s structure tends to be its spine. It is the part that holds the pages together and is the pivot about which each page turns. It also determines the strength and longevity of a book and also how easy it is to read and handle. Having a great spine isn’t just an aesthetic attribute either, though it can be designed in a way to achieve both a…

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What is Qitaab August 4, 2017 – Posted in: Qitaab

The first book (in the traditional sense of a bound volume of pages) I ever designed was my own portfolio back in 2004, fresh out of design school. The book was bound as a series of printed spread stuck together entire pages at once. This is a terribly wasteful way to utilise paper, but does have the advantage seamless spreads through and through. The book happened at a time well before my typographic education, so…