Book designs that matter

At the recent celebration of the beauty of book designs in China, Professor Yi Zhongtian suggested a prize should be given to "the dumbest design".

"It takes lots of time and cost to come up with it and yet neither readers nor anyone else likes it," Yi explained about the bad designs. Too often nowadays, books are "over-designed", making them heavy and difficult to read, said the Xiamen University professor and author of a series of best-selling books on Chinese history.

The best book design should be invisible, "achieving maximum effect with minimum cost", Yi said in a speech at the international forum on The Beauty of Books in China in Shanghai Library on Nov 15.