InDesigner: Roald Dahl Dictionary

If you don’t immediately recognize the name Roald Dahl, you’ll surely know the books and movies that sprang from the man’s imagination: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach—just to name a few. True to Dahl’s legacy, The Roald Dahl Dictionary, with illustrations by Quentin Blake, is unlike any dictionary I’ve ever seen. To learn the story behind the dictionary, I contacted Karen Stewart, Senior Designer at the Oxford University Press, who lives and works in England, set my alarm for 5:00 AM, made a pot of tea, and sat down for the call. The conversation started with a discussion about antique tea cups. Karen mentioned her favorite tea cup has little feet on the bottom. As she says this, I am imagining us having tea in the Big Friendly Garden of Roald Dahl’s Little Whitefield cottage. Karen has been with Oxford University Press for the past 10 years. Her career has spanned 28+ years, covering a wide range of subjects, from children’s books to motorbikes, planes, travel, astronomy, and fiction. At her very first publishing job, her boss said something profound that has stayed with Karen through the years: “Books need to work.” Karen had never thought of books in that way before. She always thought a book was just “made”—and that was it. But that was not it. “It’s got to be a good experience for the reader, and the reader needs to know where to look and how to navigate through the book,” she said.

When we started discussing all the layout choices designers needed to make in order for the book to work, Karen and I slipped into sharing personal stories. She recalled a

conversation with her great auntie. Her aunt said, “Explain to me what you do.” Karen told her exactly what her first boss said. Then she explained how books were put together. At the end of it, her auntie said, “Well, that sounds very boring.”

Karen and I both had a good laugh over her auntie. We could hear in each other’s voices how passionate we both were about making design decisions that “work.” Thoughtful use of typography, being persnickety about kerning, finding just the right image for the page, serious consideration of the color palette, and many other factors determine if a book works.

According to Karen, the essence of Roald Dahl’s words and narrative is “mischievous and anoetic”—a word that I had to look up because it isn’t in The Roald Dahl Dictionary (or InDesign’s dictionary, for that matter). It means a state of mind consisting of pure sensation or emotion without thought.

When I first opened the book, I was struck by the copyright page (Figure 1). Dare I call it playful? Have you ever seen a playful copyright page? Has anyone ever set legalese askew? Would that make a lawyer wince? Karen said this idea came from the publisher.

Another one of the distinctive features of the book is the vertical alphabetical tabs. The letters are not only tilted in different directions, but every so often you may notice an animal trying to run off with a letter. There may be a bird trying to fly away with an “r” or a frog using a letter as a lily pad (Figure 2). This disruption causes the letters above to bunch together, while the letters below start to fall off the page.

When the alphabetical tabs were first discussed, Karen let out a huge gasp and said, “Ooooh, you’re going to move them? We can’t do that!” Then she realized, of course, that moving the tabs was the perfect thing to do. It gives the book that zipfuzz that it needs and won’t leave you biffsquiggled (consult the Dahl dictionary for definitions of those two words).

To achieve the mixed-up tabs, using a global master page was out of the question. Karen did confess  that they hadn’t thought about using the Based On feature for master pages, which could have saved some time. Throughout the book there are clever images “working” for you. For example, the entry for upside down is literally set upside down (Figure 3). In some cases, words are even written backwards (Figure 4).

Throughout the book, you will see words displayed as colorful “lozenges” (text highlighted in different colors to encourage children to interact as they read). The lozenges posed a design challenge. How do you set text in a highlight color with rounded corners? My first thought was an anchored or inline text frame, which would be very time-consuming to assemble in a book of almost 300 pages. Karen’s team found a fantastic trick: a character style with a thick dotted underline (Figure 5). Brilliant! Karen said, “That was one of my biggest joys, to discover in InDesign… I can have beautiful rounded edges!” Ed. note: See this article at CreativePro for the details of using dotted rules for creating lozenges. At Oxford University Press, the design staff has made learning InDesign tips and tricks part of their routine. In the studio, they have creative master classes where they learn things like the rounded corner trick. As Karen says, “someone will inevitably start shrieking, ‘Oh my goodness, did you know that?’ Then we all race around and pass on the knowledge.” Now for a little technical background on how the dictionary was set up and produced. All the text was held in a program called DPS (Dictionary Publishing System) and then run through an XFL script, which assigns XML structure. The XML then elegantly links to the InDesign character and paragraph styles set up in the book layout as the text is imported (Figure 6). If you’re not well versed in XML, don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz on this workflow. Just know that the process of building pages for The Roald Dahl Dictionary takes advantage of the efficiency and automation that XML workflows offer. As for my personal opinion, I’d say if you have a child, buy this book. If you love design, get this book. If you want to share your love of books, show this book to a friend with a child. Lots of little things make The Roald Dahl Dictionary a fun, beautiful, mischievous, and anoetic work that, well, works. And the same joyful creative spirit is evident in many other offerings from Oxford University Press, as shown on the following pages. Now if you’ll excuse me, all this ingenious InDesigning has made me hungry! Time for blunch!