Design feedback: Alignment is hard, even when it’s just printing. Consider bumping up the running footer by 1-2mm next time, it ended up uncomfortably close to the bottom edge at times. (Also the chapter end note / references pages were a mess.) More details:
variance: For reference, in the books that I have, the width of the colored bars along the page edge at each chapter (they’re easy to measure) varies between ~4.25mm and ~0.75mm, and sometimes there’s a ~2mm width difference between top and bottom. (No complaints here. The thin / rotated ones look a bit awkward if you really look at them, but you’ll likely be distracted by the nice art on the facing page anyway. So who cares, and they do their job.)
footers: Technically, the footer was always at least 2mm away from the edge (so it didn’t really run the risk of getting cut off), but occasionally it felt so close that it was hard not to notice. That distracted from reading, and made those pages feel uncomfortable… giving it just 1 or 2mm more should take out the tension. (While I didn’t experiment with it, my gut feeling says the text block probably won’t have to move to make more space.)
end notes/references: These just looked weird to me. Rambling train of thought style notes:
Choice of a different font that looked thin and spindly compared to the main text, worsened by the all-italic choice. (That also made it look fidgety/restless, thanks to constant kerning weirdness – the font is clearly not meant to be used this way, worst in URLs like Incentives p. 77 item 8.)
Usual citation formats are something like ‘Author (Year). “Title.” More stuff.’ or ‘Author (Year). Title. More stuff.‘, so there’s either sufficient punctuation to create noticeable points, or the emphasis creates a texture difference. The chosen ‘Author. Title. Year’ just runs together with no strongly noticeable points, making it hard to pick out the individual fields. It seems to be close to the Bluebook style, but that really relies on the texture contrast in the “Author, Title. Year” to function.
The parenthesized item numbering (23) also looked weird in that font, maybe dotted 23. or 23: would have looked better; combined with the numbers being the only thing not italicized, it looked more like a mistake than intention to me.
Also lots of typos / inconsistencies, e.g. occasional missing years/dates, sometimes it’s just “Wikipedia. Article name.” (good IMHO) then sometimes it’s “Article. Wikipedia” (why is the “author” not first here?) and sometimes it’s a badly-formatted link (whyyy), occasionally it looks like there’s two spaces instead of one (or just more kerning weirdness?), and e.g. Incentives p. 206 has items 4 + 5 running into each other.
Some indication for where the text can be found would be helpful. (Also whether it’s a text or something else.) Most seem to be on LW, some can be guessed, but for others you have to search. Shorthands like e.g. a ° after the title to mark “this is on LW” or maybe a small ˣ for “can be found in arXiv” would be enough for the usual sources. But try finding Incentives p 133 item (10) by searching! The only way to find it is to look up the original article, locate the link, and then facepalm hard at the incomplete information.
It all seemed more like an afterthought than a planned part of the book, and the look of the whole really encouraged me to quickly turn to the next page, instead of looking for more things to read.
(Also: Consider reducing the line height and item spacing? It’s not text that you read continuously, so less leading both reduces the required space and makes it stand apart from the main text without using questionable fonts.)
Apart from that, I loved the design! Thanks to everyone involved for making the books, they’re lovely! <3
Thanks for the feedback! Agree with your overall paragraph. Main constraint you’re not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost. Seems plausible I should cut one or two essays to accommodate, but I do love all the essays, and actually the real answer is just that the paragraph spacing is way too big.
I didn’t notice that about the footers, I will go back and take a look.
The end notes were time-crunched for a lot of reasons, I wish they had been better.
Main constraint you’re not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost.
That’s why I’m saying it probably won’t need that for the footers. There’s ~10mm between running footer and text block, if that’s reduced to ~8 or 9mm and those 1-2mm go below the footer instead, that’s still plenty of space to clearly separate the two, while greatly reducing the “falling off the page” feeling. (And the colored bars that mark chapters are fine, no need to touch those.)
Design feedback: Alignment is hard, even when it’s just printing. Consider bumping up the running footer by 1-2mm next time, it ended up uncomfortably close to the bottom edge at times. (Also the chapter end note / references pages were a mess.) More details:
variance: For reference, in the books that I have, the width of the colored bars along the page edge at each chapter (they’re easy to measure) varies between ~4.25mm and ~0.75mm, and sometimes there’s a ~2mm width difference between top and bottom. (No complaints here. The thin / rotated ones look a bit awkward if you really look at them, but you’ll likely be distracted by the nice art on the facing page anyway. So who cares, and they do their job.)
footers: Technically, the footer was always at least 2mm away from the edge (so it didn’t really run the risk of getting cut off), but occasionally it felt so close that it was hard not to notice. That distracted from reading, and made those pages feel uncomfortable… giving it just 1 or 2mm more should take out the tension. (While I didn’t experiment with it, my gut feeling says the text block probably won’t have to move to make more space.)
end notes/references: These just looked weird to me. Rambling train of thought style notes:
Choice of a different font that looked thin and spindly compared to the main text, worsened by the all-italic choice. (That also made it look fidgety/restless, thanks to constant kerning weirdness – the font is clearly not meant to be used this way, worst in URLs like Incentives p. 77 item 8.)
Usual citation formats are something like ‘Author (Year). “Title.” More stuff.’ or ‘Author (Year). Title. More stuff.‘, so there’s either sufficient punctuation to create noticeable points, or the emphasis creates a texture difference. The chosen ‘Author. Title. Year’ just runs together with no strongly noticeable points, making it hard to pick out the individual fields. It seems to be close to the Bluebook style, but that really relies on the texture contrast in the “Author, Title. Year” to function.
The parenthesized item numbering (23) also looked weird in that font, maybe dotted 23. or 23: would have looked better; combined with the numbers being the only thing not italicized, it looked more like a mistake than intention to me.
Also lots of typos / inconsistencies, e.g. occasional missing years/dates, sometimes it’s just “Wikipedia. Article name.” (good IMHO) then sometimes it’s “Article. Wikipedia” (why is the “author” not first here?) and sometimes it’s a badly-formatted link (whyyy), occasionally it looks like there’s two spaces instead of one (or just more kerning weirdness?), and e.g. Incentives p. 206 has items 4 + 5 running into each other.
Some indication for where the text can be found would be helpful. (Also whether it’s a text or something else.) Most seem to be on LW, some can be guessed, but for others you have to search. Shorthands like e.g. a ° after the title to mark “this is on LW” or maybe a small ˣ for “can be found in arXiv” would be enough for the usual sources. But try finding Incentives p 133 item (10) by searching! The only way to find it is to look up the original article, locate the link, and then facepalm hard at the incomplete information.
It all seemed more like an afterthought than a planned part of the book, and the look of the whole really encouraged me to quickly turn to the next page, instead of looking for more things to read.
(Also: Consider reducing the line height and item spacing? It’s not text that you read continuously, so less leading both reduces the required space and makes it stand apart from the main text without using questionable fonts.)
Apart from that, I loved the design! Thanks to everyone involved for making the books, they’re lovely! <3
Thanks for the feedback! Agree with your overall paragraph. Main constraint you’re not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost. Seems plausible I should cut one or two essays to accommodate, but I do love all the essays, and actually the real answer is just that the paragraph spacing is way too big.
I didn’t notice that about the footers, I will go back and take a look.
The end notes were time-crunched for a lot of reasons, I wish they had been better.
That’s why I’m saying it probably won’t need that for the footers. There’s ~10mm between running footer and text block, if that’s reduced to ~8 or 9mm and those 1-2mm go below the footer instead, that’s still plenty of space to clearly separate the two, while greatly reducing the “falling off the page” feeling. (And the colored bars that mark chapters are fine, no need to touch those.)
I see, I misread, yup that makes sense.