I wish I had a layout project with more width in the pages. 6×9 is a lovely format for actual use, but for layout it has few opportunities compared to, say, a big square page. Inevitably some things suffer — you can’t really afford luxurious (sometimes even adequate) margins without inflating the page count or becoming a little precious. There’s only a narrow range of sensible font sizes available. Notes, callouts, whatever — the marginalia that seem to be necessary for a game text — have a limited method before they dominate the primarey text box so much that they might as well be a part of it.

If I had, say, nine inches of page width to work with, I could give myself an inch of margin and still have a couple inches to set aside as an outer column for side notes. Luxury!

Well I don’t. But I have said in the past, in different contexts, that constraint is essential to real creativity, and so I take a dose of my own medicine and try to make it work. When setting Diaspora, I think we made a poor call on line length — I’d love to have just a little more white space on all four margins, actually. So in future I’ll take my margin and then see what I get rather than choose the margin to achieve a follow-on effect (like page count, say). The thin margins forced our sidebars to be inset, though, which I like — they start further out than the main text block and they head well inside the text block, forcing text to flow around them. That breaks things up nicely and has a more dynamic feel to it, which I think you want in a text that is not read-in-one-go fiction, like a paperback novel.

Still, for my next couple of projects I’m pretty sure I want to get a little space to breathe, and so I’ll be setting aside some margin at the expense of pages. I think I can get away with this because Soft Horizon will have a relatively low page count compared to Diaspora. This also gives me more freedom for font size and choice, leading, justification, and a dozen other things. But it also means that the book will have around 30% more pages than it would have if I worked in the tighter environment I did before. I think that’s okay — I really want to build I will want to own above all.

The other constraint I have at the moment is print quality. While Lulu has been pretty good (and, honestly, getting better all the time — the latest books I have are much nicer than the first ones I saw), it’s still a 300dpi service built for volume and efficiency over quality and beauty. That’s fine — I know what I’m getting into — but now I know better what that constraint really means and can adapt to it. So, for example, Soft Horizon will probably avoid grays because they just suck at 300dpi black and white because they are just arrays of black dots. And they look like it. Frankly, that’s pretty ugly. If I could get gray ink (which would be a colour) I’d do it, but then the cost is exactly the same as a full colour run. That would be fun but not cost effective through Lulu. Maybe a future project.

So no gray because of the print quality. That means I probably won’t do the impinging-sidebar thing, because the gray background I used there seems essential for it to work– the sidebars need to come forward away from the text.  It also means I’m paying more attention to the text itself, assuming a lower resolution print run. So I’d love to get above the 9 point I chose for Diaspora because that’s risky at lower resolution. Either that or (or maybe both) use a medium instead of book weight — I happened to be reading over the shoulder of a fellow commuter, and he was reading a book on design that was set in a medium weight serifed font and it looked wonderful. So that might fly.

Anyway, that’s all detail and I could go on and on about the choices I’m making for this new project, but the point is that the constraint has actually driven a great deal more creativity than it has halted. Certainly there are options that are not open to me, but in desiring the impossible and faced with the constraint I have, I’ve also had to think about things I would not have addressed otherwise — a medium weight type face is one, but also working entirely in black gives me the opportunity to really revel in that — to use a lot of black and build a really stark positive/negative page. The darker text feeds into that as well. Now I’m starting to see an overall feel for the work, which was lacking before. It’s becoming distinct.

I still want a big page project. I think, however, that when I get one I will create some artificial constraints (providing I don’t discover enough new ones) when that happens. I suspect that perfect freedom might not help the creative process at all, except insofar as I get to choose constraints (a blank page is perfect freedom in which to write, but I can still choose to use it to write a sestina). I’m reminded now of a book I have that is set such that every page has a block of text on it that is exactly the same height and width and appears to be fully justified, but on inspection we discover that it is actually ragged, but each line is crafted such that it is almost exactly the same length as every other line. It’s a beautiful book full of beautiful pages.

The text is kind of crap though. There’s a lesson there too.

–BMurray