Hail to the headings.

When a book has headings, they need a hierarchy. Without one, wonderful students like myself may get awfully confused about what's important and what's not. I've got examples of heading hierarchies from three books, a mass-market alternative healthcare cookbook (if that makes sense...), a media studies textbook from first year, and a first year psychology textbook donated to the cause by my lovely boyfriend. I'll look at the spine, typography including margins and typeface, and headings in each book. I'll do the covers in a later post, most probably.

Three good lookin' spines.

Here are the three books I'll be checking out. Each spine of the book fits it's purpose in terms of audience well. A Year with James Wong is for the mass-market, and a bright and eye-catching spine is perfect for an everyday person. 

Communication and New Media was a textbook a few years back at Victoria, and the simplistic yet attractive spine serves it's purpose: to look nice enough on your shelf without being super fancy since it's a book only students and specialists would buy. The same goes for Psychology, this is one edition out of date for PSYC101/2 at Victoria. The cover image is repeated at the top, and the three colour band wraps around.

Chapter heading (CH). Click for larger image.

Section heading (SH) and A heading

A, B and C headings

B and C headings

Here's an example of a chapter heading (CH), section heading (SH), and A, B, and C headings from A Year with James Wong. 

The use of green and orange are a recurring theme repeated from the cover and spine. Each CH, SH, A and C use a sans-serif typeface while B headings are the only ones to use a very slight serif, odd. Although B headings are more important than C. CH numbers are green, titles are grey, SH are also green, as are B, while A and C are orange. 

Examples from these pictures of these headings: 

CH - 2 THE BASICS: GROWING AND MAKING
SH - GROWING

A - GROWING YOUR OWN PHARMACY

A - GROWING: IDENTIFY YOUR GARDEN TYPE

B - Your garden's microclimate

C - Type 1 – City-centre gardens and the far south-west

B - Soil science

C - A It's sandy soil

C - B It's clay soil

C - C It's loamy soil

B - To dig or not to dig?

Does that makes sense? I think it does. Basically that's what you do when editing a manuscript, figure out which headings are more important than the next and label then in, more or less, the way I just did.

Creating a hierarchy of headings in a book is an easy and logical way of guiding readers through the book. They are especially helpful to a book with a contents page and index. No one wants to be flicking through pages trying to find one heading that doesn't stand out because the hierarchy makes no sense. Each of these three books have a contents, index, and glossary, which we'll be looking at another day.

Here're a few pictures from the other two books and an explanation of the hierarchy of them.

Communication and New Media

CH - 7 TELEGRAPHY, THE TALKING WIRELESS, AND TELEVISION

A - OBJECTIVES

A - KEYWORDS

B - Telegraphy

C - Inequality of access

C - 'One culture fits all'

B - Implications and strategies for Australian election campaigns

Every heading uses an sans-serif typeface while the body text is in a serif. This is a very common feature of books, keeping the headings and text in the same font family, but changing basic features to make it different enough to distinguish. 

CH - BIOLOGICAL BASES OF BEHAVIOR
SH - THE ORGANISM AS A MACHINE
A - MIND AS MECHANISM
A - DESCARTES AND THE REFLEX CONCEPT
SH - HOW THE NERVOUS SYSTEM IS STUDIED
B - [all captions in margins]


Speaking of margins, Psychology has some fantastic left and right margins. This is for the use of pictures and diagrams to illustrate the text. 
This book also uses both sans- and serif typefaces, again to help the reader follow the text. The colours of the A headings alternate throughout the book between orange and blue as you move through each section.

More to come,
K.