“They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do.”
— Steve Jobs, Fresh Air interview, 1996
Every now and then, a client comes to me with what sounds like a wonderful project. They explain exactly how they want their book to look, where everything should go, how the pages should be designed, and which elements to include. You listen and think: here's someone who knows exactly what they want. Fantastic! This should be a pleasure to work on.
And just when you've mentally shaken hands and sealed the deal, they drop one last sentence:
“Just one thing. Could you please do the layout in Word?”
You know, there was a time when I needed a good ten seconds to recover from hearing that.
Now, picture this.
You call a plumber. You explain that you need a faucet replaced, a sink moved, or a pipe repaired. The plumber listens carefully, nods, and reaches for his tools.
And then you hand him a pair of pliers.
— Just use these, please.
— Thanks, but I've brought my own tools. And that's not really how this job is done.
— No, no! I need you to use these pliers. You see, I want to be able to get in there later and tighten a nut myself if I need to.
Can you imagine the look on that plumber's face?
Especially considering that the very nut you're planning to fiddle with is part of the assembly he's supposed to put together properly in the first place.
The funny thing is, almost everyone immediately recognizes how absurd this situation is when it involves a plumber. But somehow, when it comes to book design, the exact same request sounds perfectly reasonable.
Let's get one thing straight: Word is a good program.
In fact, it's an excellent one. For writing, preparing contracts, letters, office documents, and countless other tasks, it's a genuinely useful tool.
But professional book layout is an entirely different kind of work.
Yes, you can put a book together in Word. You can even produce a perfectly decent layout. But its capabilities, the ease of working with complex page designs, and the control it gives you over the final result are simply not the same as those offered by professional publishing tools.
And it's not that designers have anything against Word. It's that every job calls for the right tool.
I could spend the next several paragraphs explaining how InDesign or QuarkXPress differs from Word, why professional book layout requires certain features, and what happens when you try to achieve the same results in a word processor.
But why turn a short article into a long, tedious technical lecture? I suspect you'd be bored halfway through. And I'd be wondering why I ever started.
And here's where things get interesting.
I completely understand authors. You've written your book in Word, spent hundreds of hours working in it, know where every button is, and feel almost at home in the program.
And then you decided to turn your manuscript into an actual book.
Believe me, if you could have done it yourself, you wouldn't have come to a designer.
But you did come to a professional. Because at some point, you realized that this requires different skills, a different approach, and possibly different tools.
And now you're asking that professional to go back to the very tool that gave you trouble in the first place.
Remember our plumber with the pliers?
He's still staring at you.
Of course, wanting to make changes to your book yourself in the future is perfectly understandable. But that convenience isn't always a good reason to limit the tools used to create a professional layout.
Trust your designer not only with the final result, but also with choosing the tools needed to achieve it.
After all, an axe is a tool. A surgical scalpel is a tool, too.
Fortunately, surgeons usually know the difference. That's why most of us are still alive.