Date: January 2002
Subject: New Spine Design
From: Matthew Gast
[ Editor's Note: Due to the overwhelming response of our distributors and readers such as Matthew, as of March 2002, O'Reilly book spines are reverting to the traditional, colorful design as depicted here, on the far right. ]
This fall, there was an apparent change in the design of the spine on your book covers. To be blunt, I dislike it.
With the older style, I could easily locate O'Reilly books on the shelves. The old design was colorful, but it was also clean and elegant. Most other publishers using color seemed to adopt a garish "look at me" design. I never had a problem finding the older-style O'Reilly books on a bookstore shelf, perhaps because my eye trained itself to look for color and then drop any garish attempt to grab my attention! It certainly didn't hurt that over time I began to zero in on the series colors that were most useful to me. I work on networks, so "Network Administration Blue" was easy to spot, with "Security Yellow" close behind.
The newer design with the mostly white spine has reduced the series color to such a degree that I have trouble finding your books on the shelves. Many other publishers use white or light-colored spines, black lettering, or both. The striking but understated visual cues that I used to pick out O'Reilly books are gone, and I'm having a much harder time locating new arrivals.
Sincerely,
Matthew Gast
Matthew,
Thanks for your letter. A number of customers have asked about the change to the spines, and all who've asked are regular customers who tend to have a fair number of our books on their shelves.
Since I'm the one who came up with the color coding idea originally, I completely understand your complaint. Once you've gotten used to looking for the blue spines for Perl books, or the orange spines for our Oracle books, it's pretty weird to suddenly have the spines turn white with just a little touch of the color at the top.
The change came about because our retail sales manager visited a number of stores to see how our books were shelved and displayed. When a number of O'Reilly books in the same program were shelved together, it was very easy to pick out the O'Reilly books. However, when books were shelved individually, some series colors were very hard to see, thus making the books harder for people unfamiliar with the color scheme, but looking for "the O'Reilly book," to find. The sales manager couldn't find many of the books himself, even though they were right there on the shelves in front of him.
So, it seemed there was a problem. A number of solutions were proposed:
Use only one color for everything, so we "owned" a color the way Coca-Cola owns red and white. That was quickly rejected, because we do have people like you who know and look for the topic colors.
Reduce the number of colors, so we only have the ones that really jump off the shelves. That was rejected because we would end up with huge topic groupings that wouldn't necessarily parse the way they might for the various audiences we serve--and it would be pretty confusing for someone with a number of Perl books to suddenly have those put into another color grouping. Having Perl and Python books have different colored spines seems to make some sense, so why change that?
Change the spines to either black or white, with some color cues. This is what we tried, and tested, and how we ended up with the new spines. In our tests, we have found that people looking for a specific title can spot the ones with the white spines more easily. However, for people familiar with the colors who are looking to see what's new in a given topic, it's much harder.
While we're on the subject of new designs, perhaps we should say a few words about recent changes to the interior design of our books, too. The following was written by David Futato, our graphic designer for book interiors:
The new interior design came about because of two factors: Over the years, we'd found some shortcomings in the old design; and we hadn't updated the interior layout in over a decade. Edie felt that it was time for a change--time to make our books feel more contemporary. The new format incorporates feedback from editors, authors, readers, production editors, and designers.
One of the most common complaints we received from readers about our interior format was in regards to the heading font. The italic heading font is often difficult to read, especially since lowercase h's look like b's. C- and D-heads (basically <h3> and <h4> in HTML-speak) were also difficult to spot in the old design. But in the new heading font (Adobe's Myriad Condensed), the headings are much easier to find and read.
Using this same font in the tables, we're able to fit more information in the tables, as well as avoid long tables that lose their usefulness because the entries are so far apart. (It also means fewer of the dreaded landscape tables.)
The new code font addresses one of the toughest issues out there for technical books: code line length. Bad breaks in code can introduce both aesthetic problems and technical errors. The new code font (TheSans Mono Condensed) allows for 3-5 more characters per line (depending on trim size), and every character counts!
The new note and warning icons were quite a challenge--we wanted something that kept the O'Reilly feel of the owl and turkey, but needed something more international-friendly. (Not all of our readers have the American perception of owls as wise and turkeys as, well, turkeys.) We ended up, after much discussion, picking animal tracks to represent the note, and a bear trap to represent the warning. Using the animal tracks, the notes are like following a trail of tips throughout the book. The trap is much more literal, and gives a very clear sense of "Watch out!"
Finally, the new design saves pages (and trees) and results in a manufacturing savings that can be passed on to the reader. (Approximately 15 pages in the new format would fill 16 pages in the old format.)
Thanks again for your message, and for buying our books.
Edie Freedman
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