Typography and Design
Since the emergence of desktop publishing (DTP) in the late 1980s, non-specialists have had access to a variety of digital typefaces, as well as programs to deploy them in layouts. We at Officina have been around since those days and have seen many fascinating developments since then, not least a bewildering profusion of types.
Types
Officina has access to the entire Adobe Font collection: a collection of some five thousand high-quality font families (Adobe themselves claim over 30,000 individual ‘fonts’). The ‘serif’ fonts include such workhorse book typefaces as Bembo, Baskerville, Plantin, Minion, Times New Roman (of course), and several different versions of Garamond. Sans serifs include old faithfuls like Helvetica and Futura as well as more recent fan favourites such as Proxima Nova, Museo Sans and Gotham. In addition, the collection has large numbers of display, calligraphic, and handwriting fonts.
Book Layout
Officina uses the state-of-the-art InDesign program for most of our typesetting. This allows for all kinds of layouts, from simple novels to complex pages with backgrounds, flexible grids, text wrapping round images, etc. InDesign is also excellent for detailed typesetting, giving users control over such issues as letterspacing, hyphenation and baseline grids.
Customers using our typesetting services should expect a very high level of expertise all aspects of book layout. We have particular experience in academic typesetting and in the layout of cookbooks.
We retain a lingering fondness for the ancient but still excellent TeX typesetting system and, where appropriate, may suggest using a version of this. (LaTeX, developed in the 1980s from the original TeX system, is particularly recommended for scientific writing and any other works that require complex maths.)
Costing typesetting can be complex, based on the number of layouts used (and how many moving parts those have) as well as the word count. We also factor in the number of pages, as individual typographical issues arise on a page-by-page basis. See our Rate Card for more details.
Cover design
The cover is both separate from and connected to the design of the rest of the book. We have extensive experience in this area and can offer anything from the simplest of photo + text treatments to a professionally illustrated cover. See our Rate Card for more details.
More recently, the rise of image AIs have allowed authors to ‘prompt’ their own cover images, though in practice these tend to need some post-generation tinkering to make them work effectively. (We understand that many have ethical and aesthetic objections to AI covers, but we feel it only right to offer this service to those who do not.)
And more…
People interested in learning more about Officina’s experiments in devising a format-agnostic page description language should take a look at our Projects Blog.