5. Making it all look good – the designer’s job

David Salariya, the designer who created the
page designs for 'You Wouldn't Want To Be
A Victorian Schoolchild'. He's working on
the layouts for how the book's pages will
look.

 Every book needs a designer, but what does he (or she) do? Most children and adults don’t appreciate the vital job a designer does. Many think the designer draws the pictures – wrong! A book designer’s job is to make everything look good, from the front cover all the way to the back page.

A typical main page in a children’s non-fiction book is like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s made up of different pieces – words, illustrations, photographs, panels with extra information, and so on. It’s only after all the pieces have been designed, so they fit neatly together, that the page starts to look like it’s finished.

The designer reads my synopsis. It’s a starting point, from which he sees what pictures I’d like (both illustrations and photographs), what I plan on writing about in panels, and so on. He chooses a typeface (also called a font) for the letters, decides where to position the text, illustrations, and photographs on the page, and what size to make them, and he instructs the illustrator what to draw.

The designer produces layouts for all the pages in the book. He might work straight onto sheets of paper, or on a computer. His layouts show where all the pieces fit on the pages.