Befure & Afther: Developing the design

Periodically, Blog of Ages will lift the veil on the creative process to feature behind-the-scenes glimpses at what it took turn Book of Ages 30 from a beer-fueled rambling into the shiny hardcover edition now available at your favorite bookstore.

To begin, a look at the development of the spread featuring one of the most relevant pieces of data in the book: "At the age of 30, the Thirty Years War was over."


Version: March 2, 2002
A few weeks into the process, all three authors created possible design concepts. Above: one of mine, apparently created under the assumption that each page would eventually become an inspirational wall-hanging. Lock’s offerings, created in MS Word, were of the “Times New Roman 16 point, centered on a square page” variety. Josh brought in some sketches on a bar napkin, which he refused to share.
Font: Black Bear
Program used: Illustrator


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Version: May 12, 2002
In this, the manuscript submitted for the consideration of agents (and, later, publishers), we decided it would be a good idea to juxtapose the 30 Years War with a quote from Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, a book none of us had ever heard of. Designwise, this spread is indicative of the book’s appearance at that point; no real unifying elements except the oppressive grey bar at the top of every page. Each distinct data type had its own unique and incomprehensible design. (The presentation of the Dunne quote is remarkably similar to a mission statement I designed for the marketing department of a picture frame company several years back. They didn’t like it.) Special thanks to Lisa and Annik for taking a chance on a book that contained pages that looked like this.
Fonts: Gill Sans Regular, Hoefler Text
Program used: InDesign


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Version: Published (10/21/03)
As time wore on, we began to feel that the 30 Years War was perhaps not quite important enough to carry a whole page on its own, and so in the final book we combined it with several other suspect pieces of data to form an über-page. The Finley Peter Dunne quote, never a favorite of Josh’s, has been relegated to the “omitted data” portion of the chapter intro.
Font: Gotham
Program used: Quark (contractually required by Crown)