Living Physical Geography

The simple cover and spacious chapter openers of Living Physical Geography belie what comes next—densely packed, art-laden, feature-rich pages. “Yup, no question. LPG was the most complicated book I’ve ever designed.” The author and editors had great ideas for this book — lots of them. Various marginalia, icons, locator maps, QR bugs, sidebars, etc.

“It was a huge challenge to come up with consistent yet distinct treatments for all these elements and then incorporate them into a page layout that maintained the flow of the running text in a two-column format.” In addition, all figures/photos, many pre-sized, as well as other elements had to land on the same spread as their callouts. Mainly for this reason, Carling Design was asked the do the page composition for LPG as well. “What a bear! Who knew college textbook composition was a blood sport?”