My background a very long time ago was graphic arts, then I moved into architecture and engineering. Now that I'm in the process of creating my first book, those two worlds are either converging ... or colliding. I'm not certain which.
There are innumerable articles and YouTube videos available about laying out a book -- deciding on margin sizes, etc. Coming from an art and graphics background, of course, I'm well acquainted with the Golden Mean, and da Vinci's Vitruvian Man sketch. If you have looked into page layouts at all, there are a couple of classical canons for page layout, which conveniently arrive at the same proportions for text vs. margins but they get there by different routes.
The problem is that, except for fancy, expensive "coffee table" books, no books are printed using those layout canons. They leave too much blank space, which makes the books use up too many pages. Looking at a lot of the books on my shelves, and then at some of the templates and so-called guidelines put out on various web sites, I don't see any consistency at all from one book to another. So how do you select your margin sizes? And in setting them up on your computer, do you treat the gutter as a separate dimension (as is possible in Word), or do you just use an inside and outside margin and call it a day?
Suppose you were going to do a non-fiction book with a trim size of 5.5" x 8.5"? What would you use for your margins, and why?
If you treat the gutter as a separate dimension, what do you use? I have seen numbers ranging from an eighth of an inch to 0.3 inches. Both seem a bit extreme to me, but I'm new to this so I need some help.
Thanks.
There are innumerable articles and YouTube videos available about laying out a book -- deciding on margin sizes, etc. Coming from an art and graphics background, of course, I'm well acquainted with the Golden Mean, and da Vinci's Vitruvian Man sketch. If you have looked into page layouts at all, there are a couple of classical canons for page layout, which conveniently arrive at the same proportions for text vs. margins but they get there by different routes.
The problem is that, except for fancy, expensive "coffee table" books, no books are printed using those layout canons. They leave too much blank space, which makes the books use up too many pages. Looking at a lot of the books on my shelves, and then at some of the templates and so-called guidelines put out on various web sites, I don't see any consistency at all from one book to another. So how do you select your margin sizes? And in setting them up on your computer, do you treat the gutter as a separate dimension (as is possible in Word), or do you just use an inside and outside margin and call it a day?
Suppose you were going to do a non-fiction book with a trim size of 5.5" x 8.5"? What would you use for your margins, and why?
If you treat the gutter as a separate dimension, what do you use? I have seen numbers ranging from an eighth of an inch to 0.3 inches. Both seem a bit extreme to me, but I'm new to this so I need some help.
Thanks.
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