The Marvellous Miss Macbeths

The Marvellous Miss Macbeths: Five Victorian Sisters 

Angelica Goodden 

Published by Golden Hare, Edinburgh, 2023 

Designed by James Brook 

ISBN 978 1 8384 0653 0 

Paperback with flaps | 234 x 156mm | 312 pages | Printed by Gomer Print, Wales, on 120gsm Edixion Offset with anti-scuff laminated cover printed on 350gsm Claro Silk 

The Macbeth Sisters are the five strong and resourceful daughters of liberal Scottish parents in a big Victorian middle-class family with art, science and manufacture at its heart. Their lives play out over a hundred years of social and political revolution that sees women’s emancipation, imperial decline and the dawn of modernity.  

Angelica Goodden, one of Sheila Macbeth’s four granddaughters, is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Hilda’s College. Among her many books on European culture and literature are biographies of the artists Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman along with monographs on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and the writer and thinker Germaine de Staël. 

The design of the book is a contemporary take on a Victorian book layout. The text is justified left and right, and typeset in Baskerville with increased leading to allow the words space to breathe. Images are centred on the page with captions typeset in Scotch Roman Italic whose quirky character give a contrast to the more formal chapter titles which are set in uppercase Scotch Roman with fine rules separating the chapter number and title giving another nod to Victorian book design. The book is printed on Edixion Offset, an uncoated paper with a pleasing texture and a clean whiteness that adds a contemporary feel and allows the images to shine. 

The images themselves were of varying quality with many of them of quite low resolution and not much detail. Unfortunately, better quality images were not available so I did a lot of work to make the images print-ready, cleaning them up and adding Photoshop filters to compensate for the lack of detail. For the image on the cover, after cleaning up the scratches and dirt that was on the surface of the original photograph, I added a duotone layer to give the photograph a greater depth and to add a bit of colour. 

The cover typography uses Scotch Roman in title case for the title of the book alongside the author’s name and subtitle in uppercase following the format of the chapter titles inside. At this size, the lowercase characters of Scotch Roman have an enticing sparkle and friendliness that creates a tension with the more rigid formality of the uppercase letters giving the viewer a sense that this is a history book but one that has a warmth at its core, revealing the extraordinary lives of these five wonderful women.

www.goldenharebooks.com

Angelica Goodden: James designed my book The Marvellous Miss Macbeths absolutely beautifully — in fact nothing I’ve published has ever looked this good. He let me say exactly what I wanted about cover image and general layout plus typographical detail, and where he disagreed with my views he gently (and rightly) persuaded me that his were slightly better. I’ve never had as much input into the look of a publication, and am absolutely delighted as well as deeply impressed by the result.

Field Guide Booklet

Field Guide Booklet 

Designed by James Brook for Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute and the Azorean Biodiversity Group at the University of the Azores, Portugal, 2022 

In 2021, I was commissioned to design the visual identity and interface for an app that was developed as part of Guia de Campo (Field Guide), an environmental education research project. The central feature of the identity is the Guia de Campo logo, a circle split in to two equal parts along the horizon, and coloured blue and green – a simplified echo of the landscape of the Azores. The logo appears on a grey background with the name ‘Guia de Campo’ reversed out and typeset in Roboto regular, which fitted the design brief which had specified a clean, contemporary typeface. 

A year after the app was completed and with the project coming to a close, I was invited to design a report about the Field Guide project based on the identity that I had developed for the app. The report was typeset in different weights of Roboto and used the three colours that I had specified for the app: blue, green and grey alongside illustrations by Carolina Celas, that had been used in other iterations of the project.  

For a more in-depth discussion of my approach to the design of the visual identity for the interface of the app click here.

Project website: https://field-guide.info

 

From the Archive: Airshow 2014 Programme

Airshow 2014 Programme 

Designed by James Brook for National Museum of Flight Scotland, 2014. 

Published by National Museums Scotland. 

Book | 44 pages | 14.8 x 21 cm | Printed by Allander, Edinburgh on Hello Silk with gloss laminate cover

I was approached by National Museums Scotland to redesign the programme for the annual airshow at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune in East Lothian. My brief was to rationalise the design of the programme and make it feel more clean and contemporary with emphasis on the images, and to also make it feel more like a substantial, quality publication – more of a book/catalogue than a programme. 

The programme had previously been designed at A4 so, with the agreement of the Museum, I designed the programme at A5 but with double the amount of pages, which immediately made the programme feel less flimsy but didn’t increase the print costs. The programme was typeset in FS Albert, the NMS typeface, with simple and clear layouts and plenty of white space that displayed the images at their best. I removed any unnecessary elements that had been included in previous programme designs from the layouts, stripping them back to text and image. I usually work with images by artists so working with images of planes was slightly outside my area of expertise! But, applying the same approach to the images as I would images by artists, I created layouts where there was (I hope) a dialogue between the images and a sense of movement on the pages.

 

The programme opened on to a double-page spread of sky blue with the title repeated from the cover; the programme had to contain advertisements, which paid for some of the printing costs, so I grouped all the adverts together, at the back of the programme, separated from the main copy by two pages of sky blue, one with the Museum of Flight logo, that acted like endpapers in a book. The title page and endpapers carried connotations of a more traditional book and slowed down the reader’s journey through the programme, creating, I think, a sense of anticipation for when the first images appear, on page 10, after pages of flight times, list of contents, introductions, acknowledgements and timetables, which were all laid out in a clear, rational and user-friendly design. 

Other elements of the design included a map of the airfield which appeared on the back cover. I slightly rationalised the design of the map, removing some of the elements and changing the colours to make it more user-friendly. There was also a timetable of flight times which was originally planned a separate piece of print but, as the times were confirmed just before we went to print, we were able to include the timetable at the very last minute. 

I was given a free ticket to the airshow, which turned out to be a great day out on a beautifully sunny day. I got to see and go inside Concorde! It was incredibly exciting to see the Red Arrows display roaring overhead and a delight to see the programme that I had designed being put to use – I don't usually get to see my designs being used, by so many people, in such a visible way. Afterwards, I found out that sales of the programme had increased substantially from previous years, which seemed to validate the design changes that we had introduced.