Formatting: The Unseen Heart of an Artbook

Jun 7, 201613 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Jun 7, 2016

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_{~ Hello hello, everyone!
I'm sae-midori, one of the artists participating in the Rewritten Artbook. It's very lovely to meet you all!

As many of you know, I'm actively helping Vyndicare with the entire formatting of the artbook, which includes the design layout, proofreading, editing, and much, much more. For those with design experience, you'll know that this is a huge undertaking. And so I'm incredibly happy to see your unwavering patience and wealth of understanding as we toil away behind the scenes. But I know not everyone here has had the chance to compile a book or practice design, and so I realize that there's a lot of mystery that surrounds the artbook formatting stage.

And so today, Vyndi has asked me to share with you all a glimpse of the types of things I've been working on behind the scenes with the help of the amazing Nyanfood. Together, we're taking Vyndi's vision and original layouts, applying our combined years of design experience to it, and evolving it into an artbook that we hope you will cherish and enjoy for many years to come. In this journal, I hope I can unveil much of the shrouded mystery surrounding the artbook formatting process while also setting all of your worries and anxieties to rest. So let's dive into the world of formatting and design, and I'll show you what it's all about!}

_{So what exactly have we been up to all this time? Is formatting really all that difficult and time-consuming? Don't you just place everyone's gorgeous artwork on the correct pages, throw a couple of interviews at the back, make a few text designs, and you're done, right? It's just formatting, so what's taking so long? These are all very excellent questions - ones that I shall answer right here and now for you!

Formatting an artbook is actually very similar to Alice and her Wonderland. To simply say it's 'just formatting' would be like Alice saying, "It's just a rabbit hole."

Formatting and designing layouts are truly like the complex world of Wonderland hidden in plain sight behind an ordinary rabbit hole. They're the unseen heart of an artbook. They're what bind everything together, yet they're the one aspect of an artbook that often gets overlooked or goes unnoticed by readers. And that's actually a good thing! A solid design in an artbook can still be compelling and beautiful, but it does not call all the attention to itself. Rather it's meant to quietly and gracefully complement the amazing art that the artists have worked so hard to create. And that's exactly what we're working on each day.

As a small taste of what it's like to be the co-formatter and editor for the Rewritten Artbook, here's a list of some of my duties:

  Typesetting & Typography
Any page with text needs to have clean and uniform formatting. This includes finding an overarching font palette (much like a color palette in a drawing, but for fonts), adjusting word kerning, paragraph leading, font size, exact font color, and font style. Not only does text need to be arranged on pages in a compositionally pleasing way, but also in a practical way as well so that it will not fall too close to the gutter, or the center crease of the artbook, when printed.

  Formatting the Artist Interviews
There are 32 pages of interviews. There are 10 - 13 questions and answers per interview to be formatted, typeset, proofread, and edited. Somewhere around 15+ of those pages have graphics. Only a few pages have one single graphic, but most have multiple graphics per page. Some of these pages also have image collages on them that require extra designing so that they accurately illustrate the artists' ideas in their interviews. Also, each artist we interviewed gave us a completely different length of answers to each question. So some interviews are very short, and some interviews are very long. The text for each must be formatted so that it not only looks good for that particular interview, but so that all interviews feel unified despite there being major differences between them. And for those interviews with pictures, the final formats are sent back to the original artists to make sure they're happy with the image formatting of their interview. If they have changes, I then edit and fix it until the artist is content that the graphics properly depict what they talked about in their interview.

  Adjusting Color Themes
We've created an overarching color theme that flows throughout the book. Every page with text or graphic designs on it needs to follow this theme. This includes the introductory and concluding pages of the book, the Table of Contents, Chapter Sections (there are 4 total), the Special Thanks and Donators page, and the Artist Index. The best colors need to be found and adjusted so that they will not only print beautifully, but so that they will make all the graphic art (that Nyanfood so kindly volunteered to draw) shine and support the flow of the entire book.

  Print Checking
Every page I mentioned above, as well as all 32 pages of interviews, need to be print checked. By this, I mean I print it out on my little home printer to check if all those pages are comfortable for you to read. This means looking for and fixing text that is too big or too small, adjusting the sizing of graphics if they appear too overwhelmingly large or tiny on the printed page, and making sure no elements will fall into the gutter or be cut off by bleed (edge) margins. I also check to see how the colors printed. Though it is only on a small home printer, it still gives me a rough estimate of how the colors will print at the book publishers. If any pages fail the print check, I go back and fix them and print check them once again. Some pages pass the print check quite easily, while others need many more revisions and multiple print checks until they are as perfect as I can get them.

Haha, that's a lot of things to do! And this is only a partial list, for there are actually many, many more things that I attend to, but I didn't want to overwhelm you with too much all at once. This is what I have been doing, and what I will continue to do every day until the book is finished. This is the reality of what it means to format an artbook. Welcome to the intense world of design, everyone!

Now some may say all this work isn't really necessary. Very true! Just as there are many paths to creating art, there are just as many to creating design layouts and formatting. Vyndi, Nyan, and I could have taken a much easier path. We could have done a minimal or average amount of formatting, taking as many shortcuts as we could along the way to get the artbook sent out as quickly as possible. Haha, it certainly would have saved us a lot of time, and it would have been a lot less stress and work for us too!

But if we took that route, an artist interview in the book, for instance, might have looked something like this:

But we wanted to make this artbook as amazingly lovely as we could.
And so instead, we've chosen to format the artist interviews like this:

Even for the Artist Index, which is a very useful yet plainly designed page in most books,
we could have left it formatted as a basic list like this for you:

But once again, we chose to go the extra mile and format it like this:

These aren't the only pages we have transformed. Remember all those pages I mentioned earlier? We have transformed those too! All of this takes an unspeakable amount of volunteered time, the greatest of care, extreme attention to detail, and a willingness to scrap an entire design if it does not adhere to a high standard of excellence. Each and every single page of this artbook is being treated in this way. We all want to see the beautiful Alices come to life with every turn of a page. We dearly want to read of the inspiring insights and breakthrough discoveries that artists shared with us in their interviews. We want to happily study each WIP and learn how our artists painted such incredible art. And we want to cherish this book for many years to come, just as we have all cherished our favorite fairy tales since childhood. We all want Rewritten to be an incredibly amazing artbook that has you smiling from cover to cover, which is why we're giving it our utmost care and dedication.

So while we are indeed working as quickly as we can, we will not rush or take lazy shortcuts to hurry along the formatting process. Such actions will only result in a sub-par artbook. And to send out such an artbook to everyone would be incredibly disrespectful to all the artists who have poured their hearts and souls into creating beautiful scenes to share with you. And it would be incredibly disrespectful to all of you who have supported us for so long. We greatly value and cherish each and every single one of you who have supported us and cheered us on as we diligently work. Formatting a high quality artbook is a strenuous undertaking filled with days of intense mathematical precision and tedious editing and re-editing. There are times when we find we have to throw away and redo whole layouts that took us days to create. But we do it because we know it will make the artbook ten times better. All of this, day after day, can easily turn into a highly stressful soul-crushing situation. And so to see so many of your lovely comments and encouraging words are like beautiful music to our ears! And for that we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. We're so incredibly happy for your compassion and understanding!}

_{So if we happen to fall silent here at Rewritten, it does not mean we are idle or neglectful. Nothing could be further from the truth. Right now, all the pieces have been handed over to me, and so I am working on this every day until it is done. And I mean that quite literally - I have literally set aside all my personal art projects, and with each passing day, I attend to the formatting, proofreading, editing, writing, and overall organization of this now 178 page artbook. So for those who are eagerly awaiting, we completely understand your excitement and anticipation. But please know that when all's quiet here at the Rewritten group, it means we're focusing all our energies and efforts into designing a wonderful artbook for you!}

_{Thank you so very much for all your generous patience, everyone!
I know that was a lot to read, but I sincerely hope it answered any questions for those who were curious,
and that it has laid all of your worries to rest once and for all.

We shall continue to do our absolute best to make this a beautiful artbook for you!

~}