Interpolated Editorial Design

Established practices of editorial design for fiction and non-fiction primarily focus on the visual communication and curation of meaning to a user of a given text. This is usually accomplished via art direction, delivery platform, and overall form as defined by a designer. While within these parameters exist opportunities for designers to make significant interventions in a text, a text’s content proper is primarily defined by editors earlier in the book publishing process. According to this model, the relationship between editorial and design is vertical and linear in nature: editors handle initial publishing interventions in the text, while designers later intervene as facilitators of form and production. This thesis project challenges these established industry practices with regards to the publishing process of new editions of long-form literary classics: it defines new editorial roles for designers and proposes a collaborative and cyclical publishing process wherein the designer further defines the meaning of the text. Moreover, through consultation with professionals in literary education, extensive case studies, user group interviews and profiles, and experimental prototyping, this thesis defines new ways for designers to serve contemporary users of textual artifacts; these users engage in an increasingly multimedia environment of texts, images as texts, and texts as images. Prototyping of this project has yielded a new edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and an editorial design system that the researcher calls Interpolated Editorial Design, or InterED.