Meditation: In Pursuit of the Real – book

Recently, a client, Inner Life Directions Publishing, asked that I design a book for e-publication. The brief – being part of a campaign to distribute useful information regarding a particular method of meditation – stipulated output in three formats: Epub, Mobi, and PDF.

First thing was to

read the manuscript, understand the tone and voice of the author and try and grasp the meaning of the book. Once this task was completed,  the design began.
I wanted typefaces that well reflected the text. I chose Open Sans for the primary headings, and the ever-humanist EB Garamond for the body. These weren’t my first choices – I’d wanted FF Meta Sans, for example – but this was outside the budget for this project.

A working manuscript was stripped of all its formatting, then I imported the copy into an InDesign book created for the job – which comprised of a separate file for each of the chapters and prominent sections of the book. Details relating the formatting of the book’s features using InDesign and ‘my text editor of choice’ is a blog post for another day 😉 . Because the primary format of the book is intended for re-flowable e-readers, I set basic character numbers per line, but didn’t fuss too much, because the user – and device – will have ultimate control.

The chapter pages

Having created illustrations for Inner Life Directions for some time, I felt the chapter pages in the book would benefit from a decorative illustration similar to the ones used on their website. This is what the chapter pages look like:

As a separate leg of this project, I created some promotional assets for use in social media and elsewhere. For example, to show the cover image within a variety of devices:

See the book itself

The book is available at Amazon, as well as the Inner Life Directions website. Check it out and let me know what you think.