color schemes
In the unlikely event that we will ever be publishing a series of books, we’d better have a strategy to design the next one as we don’t want to go through this time-consuming process each time. So we need a concept, a consistent lay-out and a consistent color scheme.
Think of the O’Reilly hacks books. Their concept is to have a white background with a black&white photo of a tool on it, their layout is : a huge colored title at the top and the authors at the bottom, their color-scheme is set according to the topic but always using just one color! Pretty simple, but extremely effective in creating a common look-and-feel for the series.
Our concept is to take a macro photo of a mathematical game in duotone .
Clearly, the game will vary throughout the series and may even depend on the author (the example-game is Gipf). Duotone (that is, converting the photo to grayscale and replacing white by another color and adjusting saturation) because we are no graphic designers and have no control on the final result if we would go for something more involved.
Of course, the second color will also change throughout the series. As we have no time to read interesting books such as the color harmony workbook we just went for a variation of the triad color idea. That is,
Any three colors with a balanced triangular relationship are triads. The basic triad consists of three colors equidistant on the color wheel. The best known of all color schemes are: the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue; the secondary colors, orange, green and violet; and the remaining tertiary colors, like red-orange and blue-violet. Triadic colors are usually considered pleasing to the eye.
Given the first color, we add first 120 and then 240 to its hue-value. For the 4th color we take the opposing color (+180) and the 5th and 6th colors make a second triad. For the 7th color we then have to go for +150 and form another triad and so on and so on. An example of how such a series might look is given at the top.
Finally, as for the lay-out, well, it’s far from perfect but it’s the best we managed to do before we got fed up with it. But, perhaps you might appreciate the stylish hyphens in subtitle and in the numbering line, compatible with our own chapterstyle.