If one looks carefully, how printed books, eBooks, websites or technical reports are designed, one can see a few, which have an excellent design and many, which have an absolutely ugly design.

In between are all those designs, which don’t show pronounced mistakes, but which just look dull.

• The excellent designs were probably made by excellent designers and the dull ones either by poor designers or  laymen.

• But who made the very ugly ones, in which almost all mistakes, which are possible, are made ?

In eBooks, which are read with an eBook – Reader, only a few design rules can be applied, because the reader can choose the font size and there are not so many tools available, like for instance different fonts,  to design an eBook.

• But for printed books, all design rules for a good design can be applied. And that should also be done, if an eBook shall get published as a   print on demand   book.

Not just  transfer the eBook into a   pdf-file-format   and then publish it  at Amazon, but design it as good as possible, so that it looks great as a printed book.

Of course, many authors, who work as freelance authors, cannot pay for a professional designer and therefore they have to learn at least the basics of how to design a printed book.

An excellent book to learn the basics is:

Claudia Korthaus

Das Design-Buch für Nicht-Designer

Claudia Korthaus describes the basic guidelines for good design and gives many examples  of good and bad design.

Having learnt  from that book the principles of good design, it will be possible, to improve ones own design, so that at least an ugly design can be avoided  and  one hopefully moves a bit more  from a dull design to an excellent design.

But if one wants, to have an excellent design,  one probably should hire an excellent designer and at least companies should do it, to streamline all their published documents and their websites. It is also no drawback, if their internal reports or their offers have great designs.

I still wonder,  how  somebody is able to make an absolutely  ugly design; where did he study that ?  Because just by chance it is impossible.