Created and designed the electronic version of the book “On Life, Death and Love”

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 21:30:06 +0100

Task
Design and layout of the ebook version of “On Life, Death and Love” in ePub format.

In addition to the printed edition of “On Life, Death and Love”, I have created an electronic version. It includes all the stories and illustrations from the original.

Each chapter is designed exactly like the print edition

There is a small indentation between paragraphs for ease of reading

The illustrations are embedded in the text

All footnotes come immediately after the relevant paragraph

The book is available as a free download on the LitRes website.

Project members

Designer
Таня Соколовская

Автор
Lea Wedensky

Illustrator
Masha Roitman

Literary editor
Gulnara Sabrekova

Postcards and posters for the book presentation “On Life, Death and Love”

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 21:39:42 +0100

Task
Design gift materials for the presentation of the book “On Life, Death and Love”.

For the presentation of Lea Wedensky’s book “On Life, Death and Love” I designed promotional and gift materials: flyers, postcards and posters with illustrations and quotes from the stories.

Poster with mainly the project “Living Word”. A3 and A2 format

Invitation flyers for the presentation

I also made a postcard with the image of the Word of Life Project, which you can sign on the back yourself:

Project members

Designer
Tanya Sokolovskaya

Author
Lea Wedensky

Illustrator
Masha Roitman

How I design and layout the book

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 22:44:05 +0100

А тут электронная версия книги

Introducing my first book publication! I am very happy that I had the chance to discover this new direction in design. Working on the design of the book was not easy, but interesting. Here I will show you the process of work and all the behind-the-scenes details.

The task: to layout, design and help publish a fiction book by Israeli author and psychologist Lea Wedensky. The book is called “Of Life, Death and Love”.

From the conversation with the author, I learnt that the book will be bilingual — in Russian and in Hebrew, and according to the idea the text should be divided into two columns. Therefore, for greater convenience, I chose a square format for the book.

The stories were illustrated by artist Masha Roitman. The illustrations are stunning and lively, made in graphic style with pencil on paper:

Almost immediately I had an image of a book with an association on the theme of life and death — a white-coloured cover with dark margins.

Sketch of the cover. The Hebrew text is a rough Google translation of the Russian-language title

At this point, I put the cover aside and proceeded to the book block. Here things turned out to be a bit more complicated. Hebrew is a right-handed writing, so the book opens from left to right. It means that Russian texts will be read backwards, which is not quite convenient.

The first version of the book page was like this:

It didn’t seem bad. But the more I got into the book design, the more I realised the unfitness of the first version. In addition, in the process there was a conflict with the illustrations — they are both horizontal and vertical. If you limit them to the typing strip, you get large margins that are disharmonious with the text block. I decided to place the illustrations “under the crop”, but this worked for the vertical illustrations, the horizontal ones continued to “cut the eye”.

Vertical illustration

Horizontal illustration

At this stage, the author refused to combine Hebrew and Russian in one book — it was the best solution.

I went ahead and removed the Hebrew-language text. Now the text blocks seem too massive and the lines too long. It is uncomfortable to read such text, your eyes get tired quickly. The font size cannot be increased, it is already large enough.

I’m thinking of a solution:
— Since we no longer require a two-column layout, there’s no longer a need to stick to the square format. Why not change it?

Taking into account that all the illustrations are drawn on A4 paper, I chose the proportional format — A5 — for full harmony.

When working on the square version I relied only on my aesthetic taste, but with the A5 format I had difficulties. In my search for a harmonious proportion of strip sets, I discovered Jan Tschichold and his “The Form of the Book” — a delightful “textbook” about book layout and design.

Following the Van de Graaf’s canon, the strip set began to look like this:

The illustrations also fit into the strip of the set. At the same time, I made up the cover to fit the new format

Van de Graaf canon of page construction

Harmony for text blocks and illustrations has been found. There was no need for a large font, so for ease of reading, I reduced it from 12 to 11 pt, now a line holds an average of 5–7 words.

I chose two fonts for the text: Newton for the main text (combines high readability and features of old-style fonts, under the eternal themes touched upon in the narrative) and Jakob for the headings (handwritten font, perfectly harmonises with the graphic illustrations).

Working on the text, I also followed Tschichold’s recommendations.

I centred the headline, typed it in capitals with a small spacing of letters, and separated it from the main text with an indent. Therefore, the first paragraph is not indented to the left:

The wide margins allowed for greater leading spacing, which added air and harmony to the typographic plane. In addition, I was able to keep the typing strip intact and place all the footnotes in the margins:

13.jpg.

To visually equalise the border of the text block, I partially moved the punctuation marks beyond it:

Wrong

Correct

When punctuation marks are inside the block, geometrically the border is flat, but visually it is floating and curved. If the signs are partially taken out, then visually the border is levelled and looks nicer. For clarity:

5.gif.

Separately I would like to talk about “hanging” prepositions. It is correct to move them together with the related word to a new line, but I often encounter neglect of this rule. Most likely this is due to unwillingness to transfer them manually or not knowing how to automate this process. That’s why below I’ve described how to do it in InDesign.

Removing “hanging” prepositions in InDesign

Open the document and create a Character Style with the only setting “No Break”, and give it the same name:

Next, create a Paragraph Style for the main text and go to the GREP Style tab. There we click the “New GREP Style” button and in the drop-down list “Apply Style” choose our previously created “No Break”:

In the “To Text” field, type all prepositions:
(?<= )((в|‬на|‬под|‬с|‬со|‬во|‬без|‬то|‬ли|‬бы|‬или|‬да|‬но|‬что|‬а|‬и|‬у|‬уж|‬так|‬как|‬для|‬перед|‬через|над|‬‬при|‬по|‬до|‬от|‬о|‬об|‬‬про|‬к|‬ко|‬не|‬за|‬из|‬ни|‬нас|‬я|‬он|‬она|‬оно|‬они|‬мы|‬ее|‬её|‬его|‬вас|‬ты|‬вы‬|‬все|‬всё)( |\. |, ))+

Next, create a new GREP Style by analogy with the first one, but for capitalised prepositions:
((?<= )|(?<=^))((В|‬На|‬Под|С|‬Со|‬Во|‬Без|‬То|‬Ли|‬Бы|‬Или|Да|‬Но|‬Что|‬А|‬И|‬У|‬Уж|‬Так|‬Как|Для|‬Перед|‬Через|Над|‬‬При|‬По|‬До|‬От|‬О|‬Об|‬‬Про|‬К|‬Ко|‬Не|За|Из|‬Ни|‬Нас|‬Я|‬Он|Она|‬Оно|‬Они|‬Мы|‬Ее|‬Её|‬Его|‬Вас|‬Ты|‬Вы‭|‬Все|‬Всё) )+

To make it clear:

The condition (?<= ) means: only if there is a space before the preposition;
(?<=^) means: only if the preposition is at the beginning of the paragraph;
(‬в|‬на|‬под|‬с|‬со|‬во‭|...|‬вы‬|‬все|‬всё) — a list of all prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions that should not be left at the end of a line;
( |\. |, ) — signs after prepositions: space, dot+space, comma+space. The \ symbol indicates that the dot after it is treated as a dot, not as a GREP metacharacter);
+ indicates that the condition also applies to consecutive prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions, e. g. “but we thought it was interesting”.

Read more about GREP metacharacters and principles of operation in the GREP manual.

Result of work:

Book cover

Illustration style front endpaper

The title page is typed in the shape of a cup and inscribed within the frames of the set band

Horizontal illustrations, unlike vertical illustrations, are located directly in the text

There are footnotes in the book. To avoid disturbing the text, I have placed them in the wide margins rather than below the text

The book is divided into five parts, with the beginning of each part decorated with an illustration-style frame and handwritten text

A book in life

Project members

Designer
Tanya Sokolovskaya

Author
Lea Wedensky

Illustrator
Masha Roitman

Literary editor
Gulnara Sabrekova

How the logo of The Word of Life literary project came into being

Mon, 25 May 2015 19:34:09 +0100

One of the latest works is a logo for the literary community “The Word of Life” in Israel, run by psychologist Lea Wedensky. The project is designed to develop a culture of self-expression, thinking and speech.

94-8.jpg.

At the beginning of the work on The Word of Life, we had a little mishap. The first discussions I had about the work to be done were not with the project manager but with his assistant. From him, we received an already existing graphic image of The Word of Life project together with wishes for the future logo.

The visual image of the project The Word of Life. Artist Masha Roitman

After working on the first sketch, we set up a general meeting, with Lea already present. It was there that we realised that we had been wrong. Her vision of the logo was completely different. Accordingly, our sketch “failed”.

The first sketch

By the way, I have a principle — to work directly with the person who makes the final decision on the project. If you don’t follow it, the result runs the risk of being far from the desired one, the project not being accepted, and the work starting all over again. It is good that this mishap became clear at the beginning of the work.

Having communicated with Lea, I got the exact wishes — the sign should be laconic, and reflect the person, letter and nature, i.e. the visual image of the project.

zs-3.jpeg.
The second sketch, which I continued to work on

I finalised the sign, practically without deviating from the sketch, and tried to make the font part “alive” by simulating writing with a pen. Below is the result:

By the way, in the finished logo, we also saw the shape of a pomegranate, and the pomegranate is a symbol of fertility in Israel. This finding especially pleased Lea :-)

The rules and guidelines for using the logo are collected in a guideline:

Tanya Sokolovskaya's blog: posts tagged Lea Wedensky

Created and designed the electronic version of the book “On Life, Death and Love”

Postcards and posters for the book presentation “On Life, Death and Love”

How I design and layout the book

Removing “hanging” prepositions in InDesign

To make it clear:

Result of work:

How the logo of The Word of Life literary project came into being