A few weeks ago, John Green finally finished the Zombie Apocalypse novella he had promised to write for the Project for Awesome raffle. He sent it to me to design into a PDF, which would be emailed to everybody who bought a raffle ticket. I was the first person besides him to read it, which was pretty awesome. I definitely enjoyed it, and it was nowhere near as terrible as he had proclaimed it to be.
I had designed the cover a few weeks beforehand, before John had even finished writing the book. My roommate LoriDays drew the illustration, and then I did the rest of the design. However, once I had read the story and it became clear that there were no unicorns to be found anywhere in the book (it ended up being about zombies who are obsessed with corn), I had to add a disclaimer onto the cover.
For the typeface, I experimented with Gotham, which is what has been used on John’s official book covers in the past, but I didn’t want people mistaking this novella for an actual published book by him. I ended up using Cyclone, which is visually interesting without being distracting from the image. It also has an inline version, so the author name could be different from the book title without needing to introduce another typeface.
When it came time to design the interior of the book, I stuck with Cyclone Inline for the headings and decided on Apollo for the body text. Designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1962, it is readable at very small sizes and includes true italics, which was necessary for the many footnotes throughout the book. I began every chapter halfway down the right hand page, even if the previous chapter was less than a page long, because I wanted to leave white space so that the reader would have a moment to pause between all the zombie killings.
This was a great exercise in laying out a novel to try to make it as readable as possible, especially since most people will be reading it on a screen and not printed out. If you would like to read it, or just see the design in higher quality, it is available for download under a creative commons license: PDF