I was a hyperlexic child, one of those kids who spent more time reading than playing, and that turned into a lifetime of writing and one self-published book in 2022. I also came from a large, artsy family, whose interests span everything from ceramics to woodcarving to photography to inks. So of course I ended up in the overlap of books and art: interior design.

(I have designed a handful of covers too. Interior design and layout just interest me more.)

Thus far I have worked primarily with indie authors and small publishing houses out of Utah. I did an editing internship with Future House Publishing, where I learned to format eBooks in Microsoft Word (yes, it is exactly as finicky as it sounds. MSWord was the publishing house's software of choice. Yes, they did have access to Adobe InDesign). And I worked for a while as the Managing Editor of Big World Network. (I still edit for them, sometimes. They recently pivoted to making publishing accessible for minorities. And that's something I believe in too.)

There is also a B.A. English from BYU Provo. It mostly means I know how to read (and do rhetorical analysis). And talk about Milton. Most of my design skills come from work I did after graduation.

When I design a book, there are four things I'm thinking about.

One: ease of readability. Is the body text font something you can read for hours at a time without eye strain? In the case of 19th century writing, how am I formatting those giant paragraphs to be less overwhelming? Is it legible?

Two: does the design reflect the tone and themes of the text? Good book design works with the text, reinforcing the rhetorical elements already present.

Three: intended printing and binding methods. Books printed through KDP, Barnes & Noble, or other print-on-demand services need to not have any design elements outside the margins. (That means no full-page artwork, unfortunately.) Stitch-binding services have page count limitations, as well as considerations for pages-per-signature and signatures-per-book. Perfect-bound binding just uses glue, so they don't have to be as strict (no spine swell there, thanks).

Four: does it look good? If you want a thing to sell well, it needs to present well too.