Book Designer and Production Editor, University of Pittsburgh Press

>> My name is Joel W Coggins and I am a book designer and production editor. I work at the University of Pittsburgh Press. And, I'm a Pitt alum. And, my job entails everything from actual book design type setting page layout as well as other duties, production coordination of books, dealing with printers, dealing with authors occasionally. There are really three kind of areas of my job and that's design, coordination of book production, and then editorial work. A book comes to me as a finished edited manuscript that has gone through the riggers of editing both by acquisitions editors and copy editors and developmental editors. And, when it comes to me, the book is ready to kind of go from being words on a page or on a screen to becoming a book. So, a manuscript that comes to me has been coded in a way by a copy editor so that I know how it is type set. Everything is done, currently, on computers, it's all digital desktop. The program I use is Adobe InDesign. There's also a program called Quark that is also sometimes used. And, if I have to deal with older archival files, this might be in other formats. So, books come to me and the initial step is to kind of schedule and create what's consider a castoff which is an estimate of the length of the book which considers how many characters per page, how many words per page and so forth. I review any art or figures or charts that will go in the book. And then, after that stage the book goes into production where it actually, the design begins. And, there are two steps to that. There's cover design as well as the book design which concerns the interior and the page layout. I handle both of these, not for all titles but for many we do in house. Cover design is its own process. It can be very involved, it can be very uninvolved. It all depends, sometimes authors are solicited or suggest artwork, other times it's on me to kind of go out there and engage with the manuscript in such a way to find art to use. And then, that process, you know, it's a little creative magic, a little, there's a little bit of system to it. There are certain design, you know, conventions that we follow especially working in academic scholarly publishing. Certain books in certain markets are expected to look a certain way. The interior design is a little more involved but it's really one of the things I love about book design is that it's creative but it's also very systematic. It's lots of grids and kind of, there's a visual hierarchy to it. And, I really enjoy that about the work I do.