Build write-up · 4 min read

How I built While We’re Here

A coffee-table book that started as talk on lake walks and ends as a press-ready PDF: eight essays, 174 pictures, and a square page, paced spread by spread and proofed before anything is paid for.

Role
Everything: writing, photography, book design, production
Type
Tall Didone capitals for the cover face, set at poster scale for the pull quotes
Trim
300 × 300 mm hardcover
Status
Complete draft, not press-final
A mockup of the finished book: the square hardcover lying on a travertine coffee table in warm afternoon light, the title WHILE WE’RE HERE in tall black Didone capitals over the watercolor-and-drafting cover art, with a stoneware mug of tea, dried grasses, and an olive tree nearby.

My approach

  1. 01Write

    • Talk on lake walks, with an AI asking questions back
    • Eight essays, then the four arguments underneath them
    • Every quotation and number checked against one facts file
    What AI actually did

  2. 02Design

    • 300 mm square, laid out against real press geometry
    • One grid, one gutter, and one set of margins for every spread
    • Of 174 pictures, 95 are my photographs. Every design call is mine
    The grid comes first

  3. 03Pace

    • A quiet image to open, a sentence at poster scale to break
    • Dark pages for Part III, the part about being inside the change
    • 130 pages, where adding a spread meant cutting one
    What comes out of it

  4. 04Proof

    • Every trim edge checked for bleed
    • Picture resolution, overflow, page breaks, and contrast all checked
    • A press preflight before any file leaves. I decide what ships
    Guards

The problem

I wanted to write essays about paying attention. A page you scroll is a page you skim, one tab away from whatever is competing for that attention.

A book can’t be tabbed away from. It also can’t be edited after it prints, which changes how carefully you write.

So how do you design a book when every change to a spread can move every page after it?

From a walk to the press
  1. Talk it outon lake walks, with questions asked back
  2. Edit it downeight essays, four arguments underneath
  3. Set the spreadone grid, paced picture by picture
  4. Proof itbefore anything is paid for

The grid comes before the first spread

Before a single spread was laid out, the page itself was set: trim, bleed, the safe area, the gutter the binding swallows, the margins, and a baseline grid, decided once and written down in one place.

That made the grid a decision instead of a habit. Changing the type is one line, not an afternoon of reflowing pages, and when a printer sends a template the numbers change in one place.

What comes out of it

Finished spreads, as the press PDF paginates them.

An open spread: a dog asleep in a rectangle of afternoon light on a bare floor, overprinted with faint survey linework, facing a cream title page reading Most of Life Is a Tuesday.
The first essay opens on the quietest possible image, surveyed: a dog asleep in afternoon light, overprinted with the solar geometry that produced it.
An open spread with a sentence set at poster scale in heavy Didone type: the extraordinary becomes ordinary not because it stopped being extraordinary, but because we stopped noticing it.
Pull-quote spreads set one sentence at poster scale in the cover face.
An open spread on near-black pages: a photograph of a vaulted stone cistern, facing the part title The World Is Changing in cream serif type.
Part III runs on dark pages. The palette flips for the section set inside the change.
An open spread: a photograph of a long boardwalk stair with the photographer’s shadow cast up it, facing a title page reading The Body Cannot Skip the Hill.
The Body Cannot Skip the Hill, from the part on pilgrimage. My shadow, my staircase.

A $500 quote, and four arguments made twice

A single copy came back quoted at $500. That number did what deadlines and taste had not: it forced a real edit.

The book was eight essays in four parts. Reading them again with the money in mind, I saw four arguments, each made twice:

  • What you notice is what your life is made of
  • Mind and order are distributed rather than located in you
  • We are inside a change we can only partly see
  • Presence is earned and temporary

So there are two editions now: the eight-essay book and a four-essay cut of about ninety pages.

That edit was the most important design decision in the book.

Building to a number that stopped being true

Every pacing decision was made against a 130-page ceiling, one printer’s hard maximum. Adding a spread meant removing one.

Then that printer was ruled out on price, and the ceiling went with it. The book is still composed to its 130 pages.

A constraint you can’t verify is a guess wearing a number, so the book’s spec now labels each of that printer’s numbers as an open question.

Proofing, because print fails silently

A press file once came out with no bleed at all, and looked perfect on screen. Now every file states what it is, and a check holds it to that.

What AI actually did

The essays started as talk on lake walks, with an AI that asked questions back. The talk came home too long, too loose, and not yet about anything.

I decided which threads were worth pursuing, cut the rest, and shaped what survived into essays that argue something.

The pictures are more clear-cut. Of the 174, 95 are photographs I took. Fourteen are generated, and the credits page says so for each one.

I wouldn’t call any of this a new way of writing. People have composed on walks for as long as they’ve walked. This time the walk answered back, and came home as a draft.