The typographic knowledge and skills honed and practiced in the letterpress printing workshop are readily transferred to design work for the digital environment. Christopher has worked with many commercial and trade publishers designing and specifying book designs. His work has been nominated in the British Book Design & Production Awards and awarded a Certificate of Excellence at the Monadnock Awards in the USA.

Medical publishers such as The Royal College of General Practitioners and The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have commissioned design and typesetting for demanding textbooks requiring thoughtful structuring and careful typographical detailing.

Educational books, such as Shakespeare for Grown-ups and Grammar for Grown-Ups for Square Peg and Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day for Thames & Hudson are examples of books requiring a considered selection and use of typographical hierarchy and page arrangement.

Classics and contemporary literature designs for Mervyn Peake’s The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (Vintage), Stephen Moss’s Wild Hare and Hummingbirds (Square Peg), Brideshead Abbreviated by John Grace (Random House) and This is Not the End of the Book by Jean-Claude Carrière & Umberto Eco (Harvill Secker) all present the text designer with wide ranging and unique problems to solve.

Playing the Human Game, Collected Poems of Alfred Brendel for Phaidon Press was an enjoyable design challenge. A small, tight format book accommodating parallel German / English contemporary poetry running to around 600 pages.

Sometimes these book design projects are no more concepts for publishers to develop; others might be further along the design process or at a detailed specification stage; and, occasionally, will involve full typesetting and page make-up.