But where are we fucking going to put the fucking caption, motherfuckers?
—
Me, to my computer, right now.
The thing about laying out a book — or at least a heavily illustrated book, I mean, if it’s all words then big fucking deal — is that you have to labor over every page. And the thing that’s totally skewed about that proposition is that no matter how many hundreds of pages there are in a book, you’re only ever going to see two of them (one spread) at any given moment. Which gives layout problems an exaggerated importance. It’s easy to wrestle with a spread for a much longer time than is strictly necessary, because that spread is all you can see at the moment, and you forget that it’s surrounded by a whole effing book.
There’s an exercise I like to do when I get to the point of cussing out my InDesign workspace about caption placement: First, I imagine the problem page hanging in mid-air between me and the display. Then I rotate the page so that it’s edge-on and becomes a content-free, paper-thin line. Then I imagine it surrounded on both sides by a few hundred other content-free, paper-thin lines. Then, just for good measure, I make the whole imaginary book block zoom out until it’s a good fifty feet away. Now that page could be the ugliest fucking page ever made, could be the Medusa of layouts, capable of actually turning you to literal fucking stone should you have the misfortune of flipping through that book and landing in the wrong spot, and who would know?
I would, that’s the thing. I would still know it’s there. This exercise buys me no lasting peace. But it’s fun for a second.
