Jennifer Johannesen approached me for the design of her self-published book, No Ordinary Boy - The Life and Death of Owen Turney. It was a very personal project, so the idea was to keep the layout design simple and clean. The format was 8.5" x 5.5" and the book contained a total of 146 pages.
For the main text we decided on Minion, as it was an easy to read font. It suited the theme of the book. For the excerpts we used Futura, to distinguish it from the main text and also, since these were excerpts, we didn't need a Serif font.
For the divisions within the chapter, we decided to use simple symbols (diamonds in this case), since, again, it needed to be clean and simple to stay true to the story.
The challenge was to keep the text even and with even spacing (kerning and leading), so that every chapter would fit evenly and not have orphans or widows (single words in a line or single sentences in a chapter).
