‘How doctors can get better’: Laurens chose a daring title for his book! During his career, he had been looking into the healthcare world a lot, from the the outside in. He saw a lot going wrong, and some things he thought he could fix. He wrote a book on that, and asked me to do the book design—for doctors.
Laurens’s book tries to help healthcare professionals with two issues. First is advising them how to get more mental peace, in different ways. For example, he explains the difference between the ‘domain of caring’ and ‘domain of influence’. And how a large difference between these two can create a lot of stress! I recognised lots of myself in that part, and I’m not even a doctor!
Small caps
For this book, I created a lay-out, designed the cover, and drew a multitude of diagrams and illustrations. Laurens challenged me, especially with those illustrations. The ‘domains’ I mentioned was only the first one. He also had a rather abstract model about how communication can get muddled between sender and receiver. He asked me to create a clear diagram of that model. I think we succeeded.
Laying out a book always turns up all kinds of oddities in the original text. Double spaces and typos are only the beginning. For this book, I noticed that Laurens wrote a lot of abbreviations in lowercase. Mostly jargon like AIOs, or DBC.
This was intentional: these words are very commonplace in Dutch healthcare. Together, we decided to choose a solution in between lower- and uppercase: small caps. Those are capital-shaped letters with the size of lowercase ones. Looks very elegant.
Bound bookmark
For the actual printing, Laurens asked BestelMijnBoek. The first edition was in paperback, the second was a hardcover. For that version, we used a bound bookmark. There were no precise colour descriptions for that, and we gambled on the ‘dark green’ option. It turned out to fit the colours in the design perfectly.
If you are curious after Laurens’s advice for healthcare professionals, then have a look at his website. Do realise the book is only available in Dutch.
Design your book?
I don’t do book design just for doctors. Do you have a manuscript that needs to get out there? Tell me all about it, and I’ll do the lay-out and illustration for you. Including the double spaces and typos.