Abracadabra! Thea waves her magic (design) wand

“Being a book designer, or any designer for that matter, is a daily struggle against chaos. Although it sounds a bit Sci-Fi-ish, we actually spend our days rearranging images and text to create order and beauty. I think that design is such an integral part of daily life in this modern era that people rarely realise that, without design, the world would have been a much uglier place.”

This is according to Thea Bester-Swanepoel, award-winning book designer at Unisa Press, with the 2016 Hiddingh-Currie winner, Selby Mvusi: To fly with the North Bird South currently in her bag. She chatted to us about her work, which she’s passionate about, and the accolades that have come as a result of this zeal.

“When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually reply that I ‘make stuff look good’. Whether it is designing a striking cover for an art book or just typesetting normal text pages in either a journal or an academic piece, everything undergoes a magical transformation during the design process,” she said.

According to Bester-Swanepoel, academic publishing, and the designing for that specific market, is quite complicated and specialised. “In academic publishing, order and legibility—in other words, making the text and meaning thereof as accessible as possible—is of vital importance. Nothing is wasted when it comes to academic text; no image is used for the sake of aesthetics only, no space is left blank ‘just because’, no word is wasted or even obscured,” she said, adding that everything is important. “Therefore it is important for a designer to be aware of this and to use his or her abilities and talents to balance the objectives of the academic author(s) and the needs of the broader market or readers.”

With the advent of e-publishing, Bester-Swanepoel highlighted that graphic design, more specifically typesetting, has gone through radical changes. “But really exciting and ground-breaking changes that opened doors for, especially, academic publishing that we probably didn’t even knew existed in the first place.” She said that ‘making things look good’ now takes a bit of a backseat, and ‘making things accessible’ takes centre stage. “I enjoy being a designer in this very fast-changing environment and literally having a front-row view of how publishing will evolve in the next few years,” she added.

So what does Bester-Swanepoel specifically do at Unisa? “Mostly, I drink a lot of coffee,” she joked. “The rest of the time I play around with shapes, textures, and colours in sophisticated computer graphic programs, and when I’m not doing either of those, I chat with clients and colleagues about their design needs and plan their projects,” she added with a smile.

If only it was as simple as that. Jokes aside, Bester-Swanepoel explained that being a designer means being at the very end of the process of the publishing process. “That means a lot of tight deadlines; a lot of planning, and re-planning, and then sometimes just chucking the schedule; a lot of client liaison and checking in; and often nerves of steel. Design is not static, and as technology, trends, and approaches change, so design needs to evolve to meet those needs,” she shared.

There are six designers and typesetters at Unisa Press and they divide time between designing the insides and outsides of books, journals, and marketing material. Having been at Unisa for 15 years, she has witnessed first-hand how much academic publishing has evolved recently. “I really enjoy the academic environment and as a keen knowledge collector, wish I had time to read every single word in every single book and journal article I typeset or design,” she said.

Bester-Swanepoel’s love for books and scholarly and academic publishing is a passion she shares with her husband. Except for having more books on a wide range of subjects in their home than are normally found outside a public library, they collect antique books and manuscripts, mostly from before the 1700s. Her most prized possession is a collection of pages from a medieval illuminated manuscript dating from approximately 1525. Their sons, aged nine and four, also inherited their love of books from a very young age.

Accolades

Most of Bester-Swanepoel’s awards pre-date her time at Unisa. Although she has submitted work for the Loerie Awards and others, she explained that academic publishing is not really considered ‘exciting’ enough to win design prizes out there in the mainstream world. She has, however, done very well in terms of Hiddingh-Currie award-winning books. Three of the books she worked on won and many others were shortlisted.

Source UNISA