Nonfiction Design

Alan Gilbertson

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This article appeared in Issue 123 of InDesign Magazine.

Designing nonfiction texts can be a lonesome quest, but you can dodge the design demons by following the right path.

“I had no idea,” an author recently said to me, “that there was so much involved in designing a book!”

“Nobody does until they’ve done it.”

It’s a conversation I’ve had many times, usually about halfway through a project, always when I’m working on a nonfiction title.

Maybe a better term would be non-narrative: works that contain complex information that doesn’t follow a simple, straight story line. (And no, I’m not talking about James Joyce). The design elements you might use in these kinds of publications can be as varied and complex as life in a tropical rainforest—and just as hard to tame.

Nevertheless, no matter the content, the fundamentals of good book design and production apply. Nigel French has covered these in a comprehensive article in issue #105 of InDesign Magazine, so I won’t reiterate those basics here. If you haven’t read it, do that now. I will assume that you know how to clean up the manuscript, choose a page size, set margins, and all that.

Instead, I’ll focus on how to unravel the complexities of a nonfiction book, white paper, or other long document; why it has design requirements that are different from simple narrative typesetting; and how to use InDesign to smooth the path for you and your readers.

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