Random House asked me to design a set of templates to set fiction for the relaunch of the Hogarth Press imprint. The brief was to produce two basic designs: one traditional and one contemporary in feel. These designs had to be applied to three page sizes: royal, demy and B. Furthermore the demy and royal versions had to be capable of being reduced to fit onto a B page.
The templates come in versions with and without running heads, and with a large range of possibilities in terms of the elements that can be included on title pages, part titles and chapter titles. As if that wasn't enough, the traditional version includes a rule on title page, part titles, and chapter openings but had to be made to work both with and without the rule, giving further stylistic options to choose between.
There are also all of the textual components one might need for fiction such as displayed extracts, emails, text messages, and so on.
One might lose the will to live while working systematically through all of the stylesheets for all of the variants, but the editor and I valiantly slogged our way through and hopefully the Hogarth Press templates can cope with anything that the fiction writers can think to do with them.
Here is a detail of the contemporary typography.
Here is a detail of the traditional typography.
Here are a few pages from the manual that accompanied one template.
Here are some of the visuals for the contemporary template in royal page size.
Here are some of the visuals for the traditional template in royal page size, with and without the decorative rule.
