What Makes a Good Interior?
What Makes a Good Interior?
In the last post we looked at cover design. Nearly as important an aspect is the design of the interior. This is the #1 area where a self-published author (an SPA) can potentially fail. Out in the wild, perusing SPA titles, you’ll see countless examples of poorly designed books. This is largely due to the fact that many SPAs treat interior design as an easy “DIY” project they can achieve in a word-processing app such as Microsoft Word. It can’t be done—period. Word wasn’t built for it and that’s the reason for the decades of innovation and improvements in what are true page-makeup tools. At Virtus, our designers exclusively use one of these, Adobe InDesign.
A ”good” interior design should, just like a cover, but clean and easy to read. Depending on the complexity of the text and the number and types of subsections and other elements, careful attention must be paid to how these are treated and the fonts that are used.
A qualified designer will ensure that pages are well balanced, that the spacing above and below heads and images is visually appealing and consistent, and that, with the exception of the last page of a chapter, pages that face one another are consistently even at the bottom.
The designer will also ensure that the margins (the blank space on the edges on the left and right) and the gutter (the blank space in the center, where the pages are joined) are correct with regard to the printer specifications. As with many aspects of cover design, this is another “Don’t try this at home” area: Ensuring that these specifications are correct is mission critical for any book being printed, anywhere. (You may have seen cases where pages appear to have been cut too close to the top or bottom of the page: This is the fault of whoever created the page, not the printer.
At Virtus, we prefer interior designs in which all chapters begin on a recto (right-hand page). This is a more traditional approach. The facing verso (left-hand page) can be either blank or include a quote, or an image.
There are other areas to consider, including the design and style of the running heads (which appear at the top of the page) and the folios (the page numbers, which can appear at the top, bottom, or even on the sides of the page). At Virtus, we provide multiple designs for each interior, and authors have the opportunity to “tweak” these designs as desired.
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