Book layout design- design principles

I decided straight away I wanted the content of my book to be purely typography, I wanted a minimal aesthetic to make the hidden concept of the book simple and effective. I wanted to typeset my body copy following modernist 'rules' as closely as possible within the restrictions. The rules were affected in different ways, for example the type size and words per line were slightly off due to the fact I was screen printing the type so it needed a certain stroke width to print effectively. I also wanted a neat rag and needed to ensure there were no orphans or widows.

On the left is my initial typesetting of one of the paragraphs but I decided just having the two small words was dangerously close to being an orphan so I played around with this and came up with the typesetting on the right. This looks much better as its no-longer an orphan, the rag is the slightest bit less neat but these are the kind of design decisions I made throughout the typesetting of the whole book to ensure I was satisfied with the way it looked and it is set in the best way I could get it.

Typesetting my book was a really tricky part of producing the book as I was determined to get the rag as neat as a possibly could which took a lot of time and experimentation. Initially I started with large bodies of type not set at all like you can see in the first image. 

I then began to typeset this body text into the two columns. I ended up typesetting the whole book twice in the end, in the images above the right spreads are the initial typesetting and on the left is the second typeset I decided to use for my final book.

Seen as I was screen printing the type it had to be 10pt (minimum) which meant my lines only had around 6 words per line which was already shorter than desired so having thinner columns due to typesetting was definitely not good. 

I focused on having a neat rag but filling the columns width as much as I possibly could, this involved changing the tracking often but not to a point that the type was overlapping 

or creating rivers. This was very time consuming but definitely worth it as the final design looked really effective. This typesetting has taught me a lot for the future about the importance of filling column width to get the most attractive and effective finish to 

my designs.

I had a mini interim crit and was told to change the spacing between the subtitles and paragraphs as it was confusing currently as the subtitles just looked like breaks in the text. I had the option of making a double space but decided removing the space between each subtitle and paragraph looked the most effective and linked everything together well. Another thing I ajusted was making sure the start of my paragraphs in the second colums were in line and under the subtitles on the left side paragraph, this looks much neater and doesnt ruin the hierarchy created by the bold subheadings.

http://issuu.com/izzieglazzard/docs/conspiracy_book_ciss

I created a digital version of the typeset (in the link above) so you can see the final typesetting clearly as when the book is printed the secretive nature of it might make this tricky. Now all that is left is producing the book, the order I will do this in is ...
Digital print black ink
Screen print
Emboss
Bind.