Look at a bunch of websites… look closely at the space to the sides of the images. Does the content goes too close to a cover graphic? Look at the space between the letters in the main titling. It should read beautifully.

In the site I have up on my screen (and no, I won’t link — I am not into bashing, but this is pretty ubiquitous around the web — I have recreated an example here) the I and the Z of “Elizabeth” are smushed too close together. I am willing to bet that this was not a conscious decision on the part of the designer, it’s just that her name was merely typed out (and yes, colorized with a drop shadow applied). This is not design. This is typing out a name and sifting through various options to make it pretty.

In the top example here, we simply typed out ELIZABETH and OLIVIA in a super fancy font, Aquiline. This is an exaggerated example as this font’s autokerning is way off, but it illustrates the issue well. The top version is merely typed out. The bottom version allocated a bit of designer time to eyeball the space between the letters and make adjustments. And also to drop the baseline of the initial cap on Elizabeth. Doesn’t the O in OLIVIA want to come down, too? These details are all in the name of seamless design.

On the complete other side of the spectrum, with Garamond (the Roman example), a near perfect font out of the box, simply typed out is still not smooth and even (though pretty close!). We adjusted the space between the Z and the A to tighten it, and the O and the L — due to the shape of the letters those spacings need attention. And then, to illustrate where we would take it a step further, we left the gap between the A and the B alone so you can see how that feels bigger now with the Z and the A tightened — we would tighten that, too.

The point is that a good designer will notice and kern text. You might not see the gaps if you are DIY. Or if you are hiring on the cheap, the cheap designer might not have the experience to see it, or she might not have the time in her budget for additional typographical attention, even though it just doesn’t take much extra time. It’s just something to think about, because it’s a little jarring. Even if the rest of the site is okay, it’s important to note that good design is never jarring. Because while the little detail might not be noticed, per se, the feeling of not moving smoothly over the site is, and this feeling is cumulative. Those minor, seemingly jarring experiences add up. You might not be able as a viewer to put your finger on it while you are viewing a site, but it just feels unprofessional.

And that is definitely not the feeling you want to project.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Hats off and much genuflecting to the creators. This makes me want to dance, get chips, and speak Spanish.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It is, obviously, the Book video for Julia Quinn’s upcoming book Ten Things I Love About You, created by Brady Hall, Harper Collins’s go-to guy for video. And yes, I know I called Julia’s last video (also Brady’s work) the The Best Book Video Promo Ever (more on that below), and yes (full disclosure) I am Julia’s sister, but I am also a professional. If I didn’t like the video I would simply do my familial due diligence, post it to Facebook and be done with it.

But let me repeat: Best. Book. Video. Of the Year.

Clearly, the Best Video of the Year’s filmmaker has to be one of the best out there, and Brady is. One quick click-thru of his YouTube page and I wonder why anyone else bothers. But even within his superb portfolio, the Julia Quinn promos are giraffe heads above the others.

First of all, the concepting is great, and the content superb. As a designer I know that no final work can be much better than the sum of its parts. If I get crappy content, the best I can do is gild the garbage. And Brady confesses that he has had some awful content to work with in the past. But for Ten Things, the Powers-that-Be-at-Harper-Collins, Brady and Julia rapid-fired ideas at each other and very quickly the concept of the sketches, the countdown, and the Monty Python-esque feel came together to create a fantastic springboard from which Brady could start filmmaking. All that was needed was a tight script, lush illustrations that could visually carry the film, and an actor to do the voice over with just enough over-the-topness to nail Funny without becoming Camp.

Check, check, and almost check.

“A good script is key when a trailer depends on a narration or acting performance or on screen text,” Brady points out, acknowledging that Julia’s scripting is top-notch. Julia tips a hat right back at Brady. “I am not a visual person,” she admits. “With each video Brady came up with a great concept from which I wrote a script. That makes sense, since I’m the writer. What I’m NOT is a filmmaker. I could never have ’seen’ either video in my head. He is very good at what he does. I pretty much just do my bit and let him run with it.”

Next, the illustrations. Brady had been wanting to work with this illustrator for some time, but the project had never been right. This one was perfect. Justine Jones, whom Brady rightly calls “an insanely talented artist” worked up initial sketches for the main characters Annabel and Sebastian, and once the script was locked in and the look of the drawings was approved, Brady turned Justine loose. They didn’t even storyboard. “She whipped up a huge pile of drawings based on the laundry list of things I needed for the piece. As I received new art from her through email, I just worked it into the animation. It came together wonderfully.”

Finally, the voice. Brady could hear it in his head. He knew what he wanted but had no idea where to find someone to do it. So he did it himself for the draft. “I half expected somebody at Harper Collins or Julia to say That accent is horrible!! Whom did you hire?! And then I would have had to actually find an old British guy to do it (which might be tricky in Seattle). But nobody said anything except that they loved it!” Check.

“Every book video promo is different,” Brady says, “and that’s why I like doing it so much. You never know what you’re going to do next, and you definitely don’t know how much the publisher or author will want to meddle. Sometimes that works in favor of the finished product, and sometimes it doesn’t. There have definitely been a few projects where I have asked the publisher So basically we just have to do what this author wants and make a horrible book video promo and that’s that? and they say Yep, our hands our tied! So it’s always nice working with somebody like Julia who gets it and contributes what she knows she can improve and lets everybody else do what they know how to do.”

What I, Emily, know how to do is to call out excellent design when I see it (even when it makes me jealous that I didn’t think of it myself). And last spring I confidently and exuberantly dubbed the book video promo for Julia’s What Happens in London to be The Best Book Video Promo Ever.

I was not wrong, and The Huffington Post went on to pick up the video (via this blog, thankyouverymuch), with author/blogger David Colbert (no relation, I don’t think) saying this about book video promos:

…[book] videos are working because they’re less faithful to the books. Authors, myself included, tend to use promotion to tell readers the reasons they should buy our books, instead of just making customers desire them… Fidelity to three hundred pages of prose is the last thing you want in a thirty-second spot.

True, true, and the video for Quinn’s London was the best out there until the day before yesterday, when this new bit of spectacular promo was posted. Bravo Brady, Justine, Pam Spengler-Jaffee at Harper Collins, and of course, Julia.

I am already wondering about next year’s video.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Bravo OK Go! Wired has a great article on how this Rube Goldberg machine was built, but feat of engineering or not, it’s beautiful to watch.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The New York Times is calling these logos “Warmer” and “Fuzzier,” which is an editorially cute way of saying “More Accessible,” which is exactly what it is… or more correctly, what it has evolved into.

With Web 2.0 (you know what it is even if you didn’t know what it was called) has made everything much, much friendlier, at least in terms of sharing information. (In reality, however, I think that people are less friendly, at least on the street. We are all so zeroed into our iPhone/Blackberry that we have stopped looking around and making eye contact… but that is fodder for a different post.)

I highly recommend this short and interesting New York Times article about the recent trends in logo design. Even if all you do is scroll through the images and captions, it’s worth it. There are nine frames, and they tell a nice logostory — start with box #1 (even though I posted box #2). Subscription required.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Last month, on her birthday no less, we launched Stephanie Tyler’s new site. It was so exciting for us that had she not been across the country, we would have brought over cupcakes.

The newly redesigned StephanieTyler.com

StephanieTyler.com is a big site. It is content-rich, and not just in the blog. However, two potential problems with a huge site exist:

A) the tendency for the navigation to get out of hand as everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) gets a navigational button and/or some sort of call-out on the home page. When this happens to site I call it the Cheesecake Factory Menu Effect. Have you ever eaten there? Good food, nice ambiance, but the menu is a book. It takes people FOREVER to order. They simply can’t make up their minds. Too many choices and they often get flustered. We didn’t want that to happen to Stephanie’s new site. (We don’t want that to happen to anyone’s site!) Because when you are already parked and hungry and a waitress is standing at your table, you will eventually make a decision. But when you are in front of your computer and nothing from the great mass of choices has a clear sense of importance, you may just give up and go elsewhere to be entertained.

B) To combat the CFME, sites will frequently under-navigate. True, sparseness has a certain elegance, but then content frequently goes un-found. Secondary pages have lots and lots of subnavigation and as a site owner, you are now relying upon the visitor to have a strong desire to keep searching. That is a lot to depend upon, even when you have robust content.

Stephanie is a great content provider. She loves sites that keep giving and wanted one herself for her readers. “I want a site that feels endless,” she challenged us.

Enter the action boxes. Visit StephanieTyler.com and try to resist those beckoning blue and purple right-hand boxes.

Says Stephanie: “I can tell things are easier for people to navigate because I’m getting requests from readers and booksellers for goodies, whereas I never had before and I had the same information up on my site for years!”

We invite you to head over to StephanieTyler.com and explore. It goes on and on and on… And on this blog, Waxcreative and Stephanie are giving away a signed copy of Risking It All to a randomly selected winner. All you need to do is leave a comment telling us what content treasures in Stephanie’s site you found and liked. A winner will be announced here sometime Tuesday. Thanks!

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

One of the newer tactics is to create and distribute a video book promo online. Like film previews, the idea is to reach a wide viewership, especially those book lovers who might not already be fans of the author.

Video, however, can be unforgiving. Viewers have been spoiled by high production value. They have been trained to expect quality. Unfortunately, many book promo videos released to date have been flat, uninteresting, or just plain cheesy. And video promos are very expensive to produce!

But we live in a visual age, so I keep expecting a breakthrough. But I keep waiting for that one special video promo that changes the way the game is played. It is going to happen.

Maybe this will be the one! Presenting the best book promo video so far–my professional opinion!–for Julia Quinn’s What Happens in London:

Yes, Julia Quinn is my sister, and yes, I have been known to write about her here. But no, I don’t automatically love every one of her covers, so it wasn’t a given that I would love this video just because we share DNA. But I do love it. Very much. So I called her up:

EMILY: This is the first time one of your books has had a promotional video. Why now?

JQ: My publishing house wanted to do a different kind of promotion for me with What Happens in London, so they sent the manuscript to Brady Hall, who produces book videos for them. Brady came up with such a fabulous concept, and his work has such high production values–I knew it would be great.

EMILY: How involved were you with the making of the video?

JQ: I wrote the script (based on Brady’s original concept), and I helped pick out the costumes.

EMILY: What does your publisher hope to get from this?

JQ: We’ve all seen online videos go viral and suddenly jump from a few hundred views to hundreds of thousands. That, I suppose, is their hope.

EMILY: Has any book promo gone viral yet?

JQ: Not that I know of.

EMILY: Did you go to the shoot?

JQ:  No. I was afraid my inner control freak would emerge and I’d try to take over and direct.

EMILY: I am sure people will be curious about the actress who plays Olivia Bevelstoke in the video. How did Talia Gottlieb get involved?

JQ: Full disclosure to blog readers: Talia is our cousin! She is a theater major at a college not far from where Brady works, so when I saw the initial script, I asked if she could audition. Brady agreed, and then Talia was on her own. She won the part fair and square. She had to do a film test like everyone else, and Brady had the final say in casting.

So then I called Talia:

EMILY: How did you get into Olivia’s character?

TALIA: The combination of the period appropriate text, the exciting location, the makeup and the hair really created a fantastic foundation for the character. The room we filmed in was beautiful, filled with antique furniture, and even a detail as simple as a the squeaking door gave me a sense of ownership over the space.

The process of doing my hair also helped me get into character just because of the intricacy involved. I’ve read many of Julia Quinn’s books and there are numerous references to maids doing hair/how long it takes to prepare for parties/disheveled hair, etc. After putting on the costume I felt ready to go to one of the Bridgerton balls.

EMILY: Tell us about the day you filmed…

TALIA: The filming process itself takes such a long time compared to the amount of footage that is actually used (the shooting took an entire day), but it actually gave me a lot of opportunities to explore Olivia, decide what to emphasize, discover her endearing awkwardness, and of course work on my accent.

There was a crew of three (makeup/hair, lights, film) and two actors, including myself. I was surprised by just how much time it took to do what she called “light” makeup and hair, and the whole process took a lot of patience. I was fortunate to be in most of the takes and didn’t spend much time waiting when filming started. I felt very new to the process, even after doing a pilot and a short film while at school, but it was a very fun introduction to the profession I hope to have.

EMILY: How about a little tidbit we wouldn’t know from just watching the trailer?

TALIA: I actually wasn’t wearing any shoes during the filming! We didn’t have appropriate footwear, so we just went without. And the dress I’m wearing in the closing montage is actually just a white scarf wrapped around my shoulders. Oh the magic of film!

Thanks to Julia and Talia for sharing. And here is hoping we see a lot more terrific video promos!

Additional note: Wax approached the video promo challenge from a different angle last year when we introduced the low-cost video promo where the author introduces the book his or herself: here are four examples: Jane Porter, Susanna Carr, Diane Gaston, and Michael Spradlin.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Set-up:
Jane has always made a concerted effort to bring in a lot of fun content to her site. She regularly posts to her blog, adds oodles of snapshots and interview links, and she keeps her active events schedule up to date. Her readers feel a real connection with her as an author and person. But it’s easy to lose the books in all that, and Jane is great about providing one or more Extras to accompany each book. Whether it’s an Egyptian recipe to support the setting of Harlequin title King of the Desert, Captive Bride, or a photo album from the movie set of Flirting With Forty, Jane delivers additional content to support the reading experience.

Challenge:
When Jane redesigned her site with us in 2005, she had two specific goals in mind. The first was straightforward and exciting: to visually re-brand her site in conjunction with her new career trajectory into Trade Paperback Fiction. For us, that was straightforward.

The second goal was the challenge: how to provide value-add for this new audience. Instead of books that would have a one-month shelf life (Harlequins), her books would be on shelves for years and potentially go into multiple printings. How to provide extras that would keep giving?

Strategy:
First we tackled the value-add content that would be interesting and meaningful regardless of whether the reader had read the book yet. And we went big. Lots of photos from book events and extra book-related content — content that was instantly accessible.

With each book we got more streamlined, adding smarter in terms of timing, and choice of features to support and enhance the Jane Porter reading experience: Recipes of cocktails the characters might drown their sorrows in, fun things to do if you travel to where the book is set, a fictitious interview with the characters… These easily accessible are highlighted throughout Jane’s book pages with several bright and fun headers (two examples below), and a visual cue: Catch this FUN janeporter.com Book Extra!

But it was one feature in particular that gave a particularly valuable bang for the buck: READER GUIDES. These content-rich downloadable pdfs were displayed on the book pages in abbreviated forms, so as not to be immediately overwhelming. (Use these links to see the readers guides for Mrs. Perfect, Odd Mom Out, Flirting With Forty, and The Frog Prince). This value-add feature ended up having a wonderful extra effect: it opened more communication between Jane and not just individual readers, but book groups. And it provided readers with a means to continue to experience the book they had just read, whether they used them in a book group setting or not.

Post-launch, in her own words (and the words of others):
“The feedback has been great,” Jane says. “Readers have told me they like my guides because it gives them a launching point for discussing my books. My guides are on the long side, too, with an average of twenty questions, so there can be a wide variety of questions hopefully leading to a variety of discussions. Not all questions will appeal to everyone and I don’t expect readers to go through the guide from point A to point B but rather to jump around. I think of it as ordering tapas, lots of little plates to share. In the case of my reading guides, there are lots of different questions so everyone can focus on an aspect of the book that they liked.”

Author Stephanie Tyler (new site coming soon from Waxcreative) summed it up quite well when she used Jane’s Readers Guides as a segue into discussing the online visitor experience and how it tied back to the books. “I love the way Jane Porter’s site has all the little boxes and extras,” Stephanie said admiringly. “You’re never done visiting that site – there’s always some little hidden link or feature to discover.”

Audience connection accomplished.

Jane Porter is the author of twenty-four novels and one novella, including Mrs. Perfect and Flirting With Forty (Airing in December in Lifetime). Please visit her at JanePorter.com where you can catch excerpts (follow title links to read right now), a regularly updating blog, and of course, oodles of book extras, here, here, and here, for starters.

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The answer is unequivocally no. There is only one space after a period. Period. You may argue. You may moan. You may claim that you cannot be taught new tricks and it looks fine to you, but if you double space — especially in published work — you will be wrong.

An example of a feed from a WordPress post showing two spaces after a period, as copied in from MSWord

You may say you don’t care. That you can’t do it. That there is no way you can retrain that thumb of yours, but you can. I know this because I did it.

And you might have to start caring, because it’s already starting to matter more than just displaying awkward, I-learned-to-type-on-a-Smith-Corona spacing. Your extra space has already started to render funky online. Just today on a feed from a WordPress blog post, the double space came through on Firefox with a capital A with a little do-hickey on top of it in place of the first space. The line looked most odd. We immediately corrected it for the client. (I went ahead and recreated the issue as an example and posted it at right.) We also spend billable time whenever she (and a dozen others) send in excerpts by running a search and replace, two spaces for one.

The double space also going to hurt you on your résumé. If you double space, it means you learned to type before desktop publishing. Ageism isn’t legal, but if you look old school, you look old school.

I come to this post with some solid backing. I spent all of, oh, ten minutes searching the web for authority, rather than opinion. I pulled the following from the Carnegie-Mellon Punctuation Primer:

Spacing at End of Sentence
Use a single space at the end of a sentence and after a colon. Double spaces date back to the days of typewriters, when all characters were allotted the same amount of space. Computerized typesetting adjusts the spacing for a good fit. Extra spaces create gaps and look unprofessional.

And from the Chicago Manual of Style Q+A (no subscription required), there is a list of five reasons not to double space. If you want to dig deeper (and if you pay for a subscription), you can read the bit entitled “single (not double) space after period.”

So, how do you space?

And if you double down, do you care that you’re wrong?

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

That waiting kills me. And I knew I would have it, so I brought something I was supposed to read on my thumbdrive. But the only available-to-me mac in the shop was the dinosaur on OS9 and my thumbdrive was incompatible. I know, all your jaws dropped, but if you think about it, it makes sense for them to have a workstation on OS9 if even only one of their long time clients is still sending them legacy files. So instead of work, I thought I would check our blog and see if I could do some blog hopping and commenting.

Our home page, on I.E. 5.0 for the mac. Yikes!

But this is what I found when I went to our site! This is what our site looks like on an old version of Internet Explorer. Yikes. And the choose your mood feature didn’t work.

Our designers upgrade their browsers immediately. (I always stay one step behind them so we can test on both versions in the studio.) If you don’t upgrade your browsers you will eventually start having a lot of problems, especially as all new sites are launching in CSS and so many sites are converting their old design to CSS or at least a hybrid. And at first you won’t even know you are having problems. Things will load slower and with gaps. You may not know… until it looks like this.

To be fair, this is an egregious example. This is a browser so old I can’t imagine that anyone is still on it. I couldn’t even access my webmail on it. But sometimes with examples you have to be hyperbolic.

Staying updated is important. As a rule I never jump in on the first upgrade of any system software. I let the gotta-have-it-first-bunch work their way through the bugs. I prefer to wait a few months until whatever needs to be patched is patched. Plus, with system upgrades, invariably some of my essential software chokes and suddenly half my fonts go missing or my accounting software freezes — things I have to stop everything to deal with.

And stopping everything to deal with crashes makes me really, really cranky.

So for some things I say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My studio is still on OSX 10.4. I know, I know. 10.5 is the coolest and Oh, the features! But our essential time tracking software would require an upgrade and I hate the new version. LOATHE it. Every time they upgrade it it gets worse for us. I still miss the version that ran on system 9.

So we are waiters. But not with browsers. Never with browsers. Except for me (see above).

Anyone else wait to upgrade? Or do you jump right in?

©2010 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.