Life’s a welldesigned book

Emily Dewhurst runs Kitchen Press, a publishing company in Dundee. She has published nine recipe books, including the bestselling Mountain Café Cookbook

D undee is known worldwide for publishing newspapers, magazines and comics. But there hasn’t been as many small, independent publishers setting up in the city in recent years. That is slowly changing and as more and more people start to produce books from Dundee, they all have one thing in common – great design.

Each of my books has a very different design aesthetic. Each one is totally individual, but they all have a distinctive quality that makes them obviously Kitchen Press. Getting the design right is especially important in recipe books and the layout is a very particular and skilful art. The designer has to work with a lot of images and with complicated pieces of text that must be easy for the reader to follow.

The font is the part that makes the whole page sing, so that has to be absolutely spot on and must tie in with the overall look of the book.

I often use illustrations rather than photographs as I feel illustration is such a skill that’s very prominent in Dundee. It gives the book a much more personal and bespoke feel and is instantly visually more interesting.

The cover designer is usually a different person from the one who collates the inside of the book – it’s a very different skill. The cover needs to do so many things – it needs to be on message for the author or restaurant, stand out on the shelves, compete with massive names in the cookery world and tell the customer something about the food inside. The cover is a strong, striking mode of messaging that encapsulates a wealth of diverse information, while also making it fit on the shelves and not just simply look like marketing material. The inside is much more subtle than that. That’s a huge ask of any designer and it usually takes some back and forth to get the right image. In this case you can, as the saying goes, judge a book by its cover.

I am constantly on the lookout for illustrators. I go to degree shows across Scotland looking for new talent, search online, and now that the company is established, I regularly get sent cards from illustrators. If I’m doing a book that’s specific to a locality, I try and look for a local illustrator – I recently did a book in Brixton in London and found an illustrator who lived in the area, which made it much more authentic.

Other publishers are now producing great books with design at their heart in the city. Playroom Press has baby books based on different cities and are illustrated by Lauren Gentry.

Katie Day, who runs Playroom Press, says, “Lauren graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. We gave her a fairly free hand as she’s the expert, but when I felt that colours didn’t work or that she hadn’t quite captured something, we went back to her. But that was rare.”

Other book design companies are much more collaborative. Andrew Forteath was the designer behind the recent Michael Marra book, but his work was the culmination of many different people’s efforts. Bryan Beattie, Director of Big Sky Press, says, “From the very start, the design of this book was essential to get right. We talked to many designers before we decided on Andrew. He’s a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone and knew Michael’s work. He absolutely understood there would be lots of input from the author, James Robertson, and from the Marra family. They wanted clean lines and lots of space given to the images and to reproduction of Michael’s work. The result is a really stunning book that does justice to the bard of Dundee. Kitchen Press – www. kitchenpress.co.uk Playroom Press – www.playroompress. co.uk

Big Sky Books – www.bigsky.scot Illustrations and designs from some of the cookbooks published by Kitchen Press.