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I am a book authors Stefanie Posavec & Miriam Quick visit the show
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Authors of "I am a book," Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick, visit the podcast to talk about their new book and their process pulling it together.
The post Episode #187: Stefanie Posavec & Miriam Quick appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Reflecting on 2020 and Podcast Journey
00:00:15
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Welcome to the last episode of the podcast for 2020. I'm gonna take a few weeks off before we get right back into more episodes coming out in early January. It's been a long...
00:00:31
Speaker
Tough year for all of us, and I'm glad it's coming to an end. On the podcast this year, I think I've had a great fall, personally speaking. I hope you've enjoyed the show, but personally speaking, I think I've had some great guests on the show. I have learned a ton about data, about data visualization, about algorithms, and about how all of the work that we do can affect different communities, underrepresented groups, and people of color.
Interview with Authors of 'I Am a Book'
00:00:57
Speaker
Now on this week's episode, it's a little bit more lighthearted. Not going to talk about oppressions of algorithm, as I did a few weeks ago. Not going to talk about how our Google search engines are taking advantage of certain groups. Nope. In this week's episode of the show, I talked to Stephanie Posific and Miriam Quick about their new book, which is called, I Am a Book. And the book itself,
00:01:22
Speaker
is embodying data and embodies data visualization. It's an amazing book. I really highly recommend that you get your hands on it. If you're in the United States, I don't think it's quite out in the Amazon US version, but you can go over to amazon.co.uk and grab a copy of it.
00:01:43
Speaker
In the episode, we talk about Stephanie and Miriam's process to write this book and pull it all together because the book itself is just an amazing physical product to hold on
Collaboration and Future Projects
00:01:55
Speaker
to. We talk about how they collected the data and how Miriam spoke to different experts and scientists to make sure that she had the data pulled together correctly. And we talk about their relationship with their publisher.
00:02:08
Speaker
We also talk about some exciting things that they both have coming up in the future, which I'll leave that to you to hear about in the podcast episode. So as I wrap up calendar year 2020, I'm going to say Happy New Year, Happy Holidays. And I wish you all the happiest and healthiest holiday season. I know it's been a rough year and I hope you will be able to spend some time with your loved ones and stay healthy and stay happy.
Introduction to Authors and Their Backgrounds
00:02:37
Speaker
So I'm going to turn over to the interview now with Stephanie and Miriam for this final episode of 2020. And I hope you will enjoy this episode of the Policy This podcast. Hi, Stephanie. Hi, Miriam. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for coming on. How are you both? Yeah, well, thank you. How are you? Great. I mean, you know, surviving, it's fall, surviving, it's all good.
00:03:02
Speaker
Um, I'm very excited to have you both on the show talking about this great new book. It's, I mean, this is a, this is kind of a podcast mostly on data visualization. And this book is like on the cool edge of like a lot of different things of data, is and design and data art. So I'm excited to talk to you both about it and the content and the process, um, really fascinating and, um,
Exploring Creative Data Communication
00:03:27
Speaker
So why don't we start with introductions and then we can talk about the book. So maybe Stephanie, do you want to tell folks a little bit about yourself and then Miriam, you can go. Yeah. So I'm Stephanie. I am.
00:03:39
Speaker
American, but I live in London now. I'm a designer, artist, and author, and my practice really focuses on finding new and experimental approaches to communicating data and information. So I will make data projects that are physical or danceable or wearable, that are often very human scaled and handcrafted.
00:03:58
Speaker
Well, a lot of the projects I work on, I collaborate with Miriam. Then another project that some people in the data visualization community might have heard of is my collaboration with Georgia Lupe, Dear Data, which is when we spent a year collecting our personal data, drawing it on a postcard every week and sending it to the other person. And then that became a book and a journal and is in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York. So yeah, so that's me.
00:04:28
Speaker
And I'm Miriam, I'm a data journalist and researcher, and I'm based in the UK, in the Southwest. And I write data stories for the BBC and other outlets. I work on database pieces for clients, information design pieces with creative agencies, mainly based in London. And I'm really interested in exploring novel ways of communicating data. So I do co-create a lot of artworks that represent data through images, sculpture and sounds.
00:04:58
Speaker
And Stefania and I have worked together since about 2012, I think, on lots of projects, information design projects, data art projects.
Innovative Book Concept and Past Achievements
00:05:06
Speaker
We've done artworks for the Wellcome Collection in London, the National Maritime Museum, and South Bank Santa and other museums and galleries. And I'm particularly interested in projects that involve combining data and music. So one of the projects that I've worked on that people may have heard of is called Auditivis, and that was with Valentina de Filippo.
00:05:28
Speaker
And we created these discs. There are 10 Perspex discs that look like vinyl records on which are engraved data about David Bowie's song, Space Odyssey, lots of musical data. And at the moment I'm working on a podcast, a data sonification podcast with Duncan Gere called Loud Numbers. And we're hoping to launch it early 2021. And each week we'll kind of take a different data set and then turn it into a piece of music.
00:05:54
Speaker
Wow, that's great. Okay, another data podcast, that's great. I'm excited for that early 2021. Also, because you talked about your project with Valentina, I wanted to make sure
Book as a Measuring Device
00:06:05
Speaker
that I dropped a little knowledge in here that Stephanie, you did the cover art for one of the OK Go albums, right?
00:06:12
Speaker
Uh, yes. Gosh, when was that? That must've been like 2010 or 2011. And I did it with my brother-in-law and collaborator, Greg McInerney. So, yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a big deal here in the Schwabisch household because there was a moment in time where my kids were really into OK Go, especially their music videos, which are incredible. Folks don't know they should just Google them. Um,
00:06:37
Speaker
But all of this is really interesting because it leads right into your new book, which has this great title, I am a book, I'm a portal to the universe, and is very consistent with all the descriptions of your work. And so I thought we would just talk about the content of the book for a little bit, you know, what story does it tell the target audience, and then we can talk about the process of creating it because the quality of the book and just holding it in your hands itself is an experience.
00:07:05
Speaker
You can't really say that for all books. There's something to be said for just holding the book. So maybe we can start with what story does the book tell, and then we can talk about the book itself. And then we can talk about process a little bit. Yeah. I managed design and then Miriam managed the data research and the writing. Then we merged them together. So Miriam can start with the story.
Narrative Voice and Scientific Accuracy
00:07:29
Speaker
Perfect. Cool. So, uh, yeah, like you said, John, it's called I am a book. I'm a portal to the universe.
00:07:35
Speaker
And it's really a concept book. So our original concept came out of a question where we asked ourselves, what if we make a book where the book itself is a measuring device? So you see a lot of infographic books out there where, you know, there's stuff printed on the page and charts and diagrams that communicate data, but we thought, what happens if we actually try and embed that data in the book itself and its kind of dimensions and its measurements in the kind of production variables that you've got? So that might be things like its weight, its volume,
00:08:06
Speaker
the thickness of its pages, the size of its type, and so on. And the basic story is that each of the book's dimensions and measurements embodies a quantity out there in the universe. So it tells you lots of stories about numbers of the universe using its own measurements as a reference point. So to give an example, we have a spread where the book asks you to hold it up to the sky at arm's length, and then it tells you that around 6,000 billion billion stars, so that's six with 21 zeros, I think, in the patch of sky behind its two pages.
00:08:35
Speaker
And nine out of 10 of them are too faint to be seen with any telescope. So it really speaks to you in the first person. It's got a kind of personality to it. It's not too serious. It takes the mickey out of the reader a little bit.
00:08:48
Speaker
We also set a rule that everything in the book would be on a one to one scale. So this was quite a tight constraint that really kind of made us work hard and thinking about the kind of data that we could include in the book. So, for example, we've got a spread where the book tells you that in the time it took you to turn the last page, around four babies were born and two people died. So it's kind of a scientific book, but this is sort of a mixture of like fact and fantasy in it. We're calling it data driven magic realism after the
00:09:17
Speaker
the kind of literary genre of magic realism where you get like real stuff happening, but it also, it's combined with preposterous, outlandish, fantastical stuff.
Engaging Science Elements in the Book
00:09:26
Speaker
So yeah, so I was really trying to get the data in it as accurate as possible, you know, basing it on peer reviewed research where I could, but there were also like these thought experiments and flights of fantasy. So we have a spread about what would happen to the book if you dropped it off a tower, like 10 kilometers high.
00:09:42
Speaker
And it's actually based on real physics. And I'm really grateful to Duncan Gere and Jonas Helsen, who is a physicist, for help actually modeling the time and speed of the form of the book, you know, how long it would take and what speed it would be when it hit the ground. But obviously the scenario of a book kind of hurling itself off a 10 kilometer tower is a fantastical one. But yeah, I guess I really like sort of XKCD comics and, you know, that kind of thought experiment thing.
Research and Data Selection
00:10:10
Speaker
Like I think in his book, there's a book he did called What If, where he's got a thought experiment where he goes, what would happen if you had a mole of moles, as in a mole like the quantity of molecules or whatever, and of moles, the burrowing animal in the ground. And I really love that sort of ridiculous premise, but then taken to its scientific conclusion with real data.
00:10:34
Speaker
So I love this example of talking to physicists to do this calculation. So how many different people did you actually need to talk to to help with some of the calculations versus things that you could look up on your own like thickness of a piece of paper, I presume is pretty easy to find. But like how many other of these calculations did you need to maybe not even talk to people, but talk to people or look up like in the academic literature, some of the answers to the topics that are in the book.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'd say that the spread where we modeled the books fall from height was the most complicated one. The most of the other spreads I did the research myself, although a lot of it was based on digging in research papers and looking in tables sifting through abstracts. So I tried to base it on your peer reviewed research where possible. I did have a lot of help from friends and family who work in science. So I'm really grateful to them, they're acknowledged in the book and they know who they are.
Design and Data Integration
00:11:31
Speaker
But
00:11:31
Speaker
For example, there's a spread where you lay the book down on the ground and underneath the two pages, the area of the two pages, I tried to work out how many living creatures there would be in the soil. And for that, I had help from my brother-in-law, Professor Eric Allen, who is a professor of ecology and also my friend, Dr. Pete Manning, who is also a professor of ecology, a doctor of ecology. So yeah, we did have quite a lot of expert input in some of the spreads.
00:12:00
Speaker
So just so I can get the process right. Did you come up with the basic story of like which statistics or data you wanted to include? And then Miriam, you went to research those and then handed that off to Stephanie. And Stephanie, you did the design and the layout, or was it more iterative than that?
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was definitely more iterative. So we obviously came up with a proposal. But when we had the book deal, and we actually had to kind of think about, I guess, 40 of these spreads, approximately, the way that we started is that I think Marion had a general idea of the parts of the world that
00:12:37
Speaker
she would want to focus on at the beginning of the project. But then when we actually had to do it, stats came second in many cases. So really one of the first things that we did in the project was to list all of the book-based variables we could think of. So page size, type size, book weight, volume, thickness of the page, then interactions with the book, you know, time to turn a page, time to read a sentence, amount of wood in the paper, calories in the book,
00:13:05
Speaker
loudness of the noise it makes when it slams. You know, what happens if you burn the book? And we're just trying to think of as many things as you could do to the book as you could. And we had a big list of these interactions and the actual object itself. Well, we have them in a spreadsheet and there were approximately 80 variables that we had as a starting point. And so that was the beginning. And then the other thing I'd like to add is so we came up with a lot of these before we actually
Creative Storytelling Approach
00:13:32
Speaker
had a book in hand.
00:13:33
Speaker
We had to determine the number of pages, the paper stock, the cover finish, and how it would be trimmed and so on in advance. And then they gave us a dummy book, which is just like a white book that's not printed, but with all those materials. And so we each had one that we could then use as part of this exploratory process. And so from there, then we both came up with ideas. So some might have come up with me.
00:14:01
Speaker
playing with a book and thinking about, oh, wouldn't it be cool if there is this information out there about this thing in the world? And then I just think it would work really nicely with this interaction or with letters on a page. I think it would be very witty if we could turn letters into animals or we could do things that felt really clever. So that's how I came in. And then Miriam would be like, oh, I'll try to find the data. But then otherwise Miriam would start from a data side of things, which Miriam
00:14:30
Speaker
Talk about your way into the process. Yeah, sure. So from this point on, I would go away and do a lot of Googling and hunting through abstracts and tables, like I said, to research papers, to look for numbers that would actually work given our dimensional constraints and the need to have everything on a one-to-one scale. So we ended up, because of the book being the size of a book,
00:14:54
Speaker
with a lot of medium-sized quantities. So for example, the lengths that we could realistically communicate on a one-to-one scale between about 0.1 millimeters, which is the size of the smallest visible dot on the page, and 20 centimeters, which is the height and width of the book, is a square book and wanted it to be a very kind of square object. Yeah, and then I had a lot of fun with the research.
00:15:16
Speaker
I really enjoyed working on one of the spreads in the book is about neutrinos, these subatomic particles called relic neutrinos, which were formed in the first millisecond, I think, after the Big Bang. Anyway, they pervade the universe. They're everywhere, kind of almost evenly distributed throughout the universe. And I didn't know anything about this before. It was just a wondrous thing to delve into, to find out all these new areas of science that I was unaware of.
00:15:41
Speaker
and thinking about all these kind of subatomic particles pervading absolutely everything that are really hard to detect but they're still real and that was I think a theme in the book is that we really tried to include things that would spark a sense of wonder and awe about the universe that we live in and the world that we live in and the living things in the world and so we've got a lot of things that are you know on the edges of what you might detect we've got one
00:16:06
Speaker
a spread, which is about the amount of gas that floats off into space from the atmosphere, because the atmosphere loses small amounts of gas, which is not maybe something you would think about, but it happened to be, I think, seven buck weights per second, if I remember rightly. So we thought, well, that's something that we can translate into a buck size quantity.
00:16:23
Speaker
Did you come to the whole project with the first person narrative or I guess in this case the first book narrative?
Accessibility and Audience Engagement
00:16:31
Speaker
Was that always the storytelling device that you were going to use that it was from the book's perspective? That was something that really emerged quite early on.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, it felt right to have the book speak for itself because every measurement is embodied by the book itself. It felt right that the book should be the one doing the talking. And then the book's personality kind of developed over time. We thought, well, we don't want this because this could so easily become an educational book, educational. We didn't want it to be too didactic. We wanted it to be fun, have a little bit of a bite to it so that, you know, this would be something that would potentially appeal to adults as well as children. We didn't want it to be too.
00:17:08
Speaker
talking down to people, but more like the book is your friend, the book is your equal, but also kind of takes the mickey out of you a little bit. That was all right with this idea. Did you have kids in mind as your target audience, both designing it and writing it, or was it more of the, you know, adult data, data art interested sort of crowd?
00:17:31
Speaker
Oh, I can talk about it from a design and publishing perspective. Um, so, uh, the, the people that publish it, it's particular books. And so they're a penguin imprint and say they do publish, well, they published your data, but they also, um, publish some other kind of, um, data-driven books, but really they publish a broad range of like beautifully produced and printed books.
00:17:55
Speaker
um, that kind of can span anything from fashion to art to data. So it is just like really, really beautifully made books that are kind of, I guess, out of the ordinary. So, so I suppose our audience, I think what we were going for is we wanted an all ages book that would be made from an imprint that publishes books for adults, but this is one to be shared with children. So that's where the all ages come from. So, um,
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah I agree and we very much had that kind of all ages audience in mind when we were writing it because it's quite an unusual thing to write for both adults and children. I think we kind of felt that it was important to try and speak to as broad an audience as possible and not to assume too much knowledge of the reader and also because we were trying to provoke awe and wonder
00:18:46
Speaker
Right. Well, I love the idea that that's that's something that's available to everybody you know you don't have to be a jaded adult and think that everything is boring you can, you can still get excited about the number of stars in the universe or the number of the book. Yeah, I really liked that idea. And also, you know, we really wanted to speak to
00:19:03
Speaker
the non-specialist. This is not a book for a traditional database audience, I think. So it doesn't have the word data in it anywhere, I think, apart from our bios where couldn't be helped because Steph's actually written a book called Dear Tater, so I had to go in there. That book and that project's really been well received, but I think having data like in like big letters on a front cover, I think it just will inherently put people off.
Physical Interaction with Data
00:19:26
Speaker
And
00:19:27
Speaker
And so this was like a real, I think something that Miriam and I always, yeah, we always do together. We experiment with like finding ways that will hopefully make people who normally wouldn't care get excited or notice this world that we're, you know, we all work in.
00:19:47
Speaker
It's also interesting because not both the content and the narrative device of having the book sort of be the first person, both of those pieces and the design of the book as well, which we can talk about in a second, but both of those make the data in the book more accessible, I think, to anyone who reads it.
00:20:06
Speaker
Like it doesn't feel like a date of is or statistics book. Just the whole concept of it and the whole feel of it makes it more accessible. It's like teaching kids algebra and they don't know that they're learning algebra, that kind of thing.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it's that, it's that one-to-one scale thing, because these are, these are physical measurements that you can touch and feel. So there's that multi-sensory aspect to it. And there's no translation required. You're not not having to look at a legend and work out what something means. It's just right there in front of you, either as a numeral or as a weight or as a volume or something you can actually physically detect. There's just less abstraction to it, I think, than a regular data visualization.
Participatory Data Interaction Projects
00:20:48
Speaker
So I don't want to veer off our conversation about the book too much, but it is interesting to me that the two of you had a project maybe a year or two ago at the, I'm forgetting the name of the museum. It was like the Maritime Museum where people had to fill out little surveys and they got like little emblems. And I'll link to the pictures on the show notes page. But it's interesting how your work, at least in these two projects, and it sounds like so many other projects are very,
00:21:15
Speaker
tangible, there are things that people have to do. So do you think, just generally speaking, that that's a better way for people to learn about data, DataViz, the world around us in that more quantifiable sense? And maybe that's a question to start with, Stephanie.
00:21:34
Speaker
Well, I guess so with the National Maritime Museum project, it was kind of like a two-parter project. So I was an artist in residence at the National Maritime Museum and I was specifically brought in to work with visitor data and try to use the data as this like interface for like listening to visitors and showing them that they matter.
00:21:55
Speaker
Um, and that, you know, that they, they mean something to the museum and kind of making this experience more participatory. And so I had to create an artwork at the end of it, but then where Miriam and I collaborated was we had to come up with a way of collecting data. So Miriam did all the data analysis and designed the survey. So she did all that data stuff, the important data stuff. Um, but together we had to craft this experience to make.
00:22:20
Speaker
the visitors taking part feel like we weren't wasting their time and that we were kind of thanking them for their time and giving them something back. So I think because it was really important that we were respectful to these people that were taking time out of their holidays to give us data for an artwork. We really spent a lot of time thinking about an experience where
00:22:44
Speaker
You know, they helped us. We gave them an insight about themselves. They went away with a gift. And then they were also able to take their knowledge about themselves and put it into context with the other people who had kind of given their data as well. So I don't know, tell me what you think Miriam, but it does feel like really designing an experience is something that we like to do. And I think it makes people care a bit more than if they were just giving a survey or they maybe were just looking at a chart potentially.
Design and Production Process
00:23:14
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think in our talks last week, we describe our approach, don't we, as something like participatory, experiential and multisensory or something like that. Anyway, I think those are really the kind of things that we enjoy to work on. And, you know, I'm particularly interested in, like I said, data simplification because it's something that is experienced through time. It's more of an experiential process rather than something that you look at like a database, which is might be static.
00:23:42
Speaker
And you can kind of have a degree of separation from it, whereas like with our book and with a lot of the projects that we've worked on together, you're very much in the data, you're kind of experiencing it in real time. And I like that kind of embodied quality that it gives it.
00:23:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting way to just think about education as well, the way kids in particular, but also adults, the way people, the way people learn. So I want to turn back to the book specifically and talk a little bit about the design because Stephanie, you mentioned earlier that you had a physical blank copy of the book.
00:24:16
Speaker
And so now you have this blank, I'm just imagining you have this blank physical copy of the book. You have the data from Miriam, which you're going to iterate on a little bit, and you've got this basic concept. So can you talk a little bit about how you thought about the design, how you laid it out, and then the work with the publisher to create this physical product, this physical book that's not just, you know, a book you grab off the shelf at the bookstore, like it has weight, it has a feeling to holding the physical book.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, I can give a bit of background about myself. So actually, um, although I work with data, um, my background is in publishing. I used to be a full-time book cover and book designer, but now I just do it occasionally for like projects I really love and for our, you know, books I'm writing with Miriam, for example. Um, so I think this was a really nice project because it was able to merge the book side of me and the data side of me.
Challenging Infographic Norms
00:25:13
Speaker
But I think the core thing to really mention, which I'm not sure if we've mentioned in this podcast yet, is that if anyone who hasn't seen the book is imagining that this looks like a traditional infographics book, it doesn't look like that at all because the first rule that we made
00:25:29
Speaker
is that there are no charts or no infographics in the book whatsoever but instead the book had to use its what we were calling superpowers so it's typography so it's font you know it's physical aspects pages and binding and then also it's ink.
00:25:48
Speaker
to kind of represent the data in as many magical clever and witty ways that we could think of. So, you know, we've already talked about how we came up with as many variables as we could to replace the standard visual variables that we are used to using when we are working in data visualization.
00:26:08
Speaker
So yeah, so that was our starting point. And the way that the design of it worked is that we were kind of working on a spread-by-spread basis where Miriam might come up with copy and data, and then I might take it and begin to lay out in, hopefully, a very witty and playful way. So really tapping into my traditional communication design roots and trying to create what some people call a smile in the mind, try to be as clever and as witty as I could with
00:26:37
Speaker
how a page was laid out or just to show a lot of playfulness in the design.
Playful Design Process
00:26:43
Speaker
And then I might try to lay it out. We might go back and forth refining the type or just figuring out how we can take Miriam's words and make the concept work on the page and also look beautiful as well. And so the book is just really tight plus lots of really bold graphic shapes and gradients where the book is using its CMYK printing process to its full and really showing off its wonderful printing powers.
00:27:12
Speaker
And I don't know what else to say about the book, Miriam, but we really wanted to try to find a way to move beyond the standard info book. Is there a way that we can take a book and present information and present data that is totally different than what we've seen? And so the way we did that was we said, well, no charts. What can we do that's stranger or more unusual or which is like really pushing what is possible in this space?
00:27:43
Speaker
Right. Yeah, just to add to that, like, it was it was a really integrated process, like, like the staff just said, it was very sort of concept driven. So, you know, quite experimental, like we would try a lot of stuff out and it didn't necessarily work like this one spread where
00:27:58
Speaker
really like the interaction of holding the book up to your face almost like lengthwise, you've got two pages facing away from you and staff said oh wouldn't it be great if we could find some data on the length of birds beaks relative to their head size and then scale it up to a human then we could have some nice beaks on the page and thought oh that would look amazing but I couldn't actually find, I did contact some researchers in the area and it's quite difficult to find
00:28:22
Speaker
database of bird beak length, it's not apparently a standard measurement. So we decided to go for tongues instead. So we've got this is kind of silly, you stick your tongue out, and you know, it's obviously not that long. And then you've got a butterfly that's got a longer proboscis than your tongue. And then you've got this moth that's got like a 20 centimeter tongue, and we draw a little pink line for the proboscis that's 20 centimeter long. And then there's an anteater tongue that extends all the way across the spread right onto the next page.
00:28:48
Speaker
So yeah, there's kind of silly playfulness to quite a lot of the spreads and also quite a lot of insects in the book, I guess, because it's one-to-one scale and insects are kind of small and they fit on the page. Well, I'm glad you didn't have to go like try to capture birds by yourself. Yeah, no primary research. Yeah. Before I let you both go, I want to ask one last question for each of you. What's your favorite single spread in the book?
00:29:15
Speaker
Oh, that's a tough question. I feel like I need to find my book. Is this in terms of the final result rather than how much we enjoyed making it? Well, that's a good question. That's a good one. I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking of the final spread, but yeah, okay.
Favorite Book Spreads
00:29:34
Speaker
So how about the one that you enjoyed making the most and then the one as if you put yourself in the shoes of a reader, what's your favorite spread? Okay. I think.
00:29:45
Speaker
For me, the one that I enjoyed making the most was probably the one where we compared the loudness of the sun if there were no air in space or through it. Sorry, if there were air in space, if there was a medium for the sound to travel through to reach the earth, the sun would apparently be about 100 decibels subsonic sound. And we thought, well, we can compare this to the sound that the book makes when slammed shut really hard, which is actually a really loud bang.
00:30:12
Speaker
And I thought, well, I'm not going to get data from this any other way than just measuring it myself. So yeah, I've got this app on my phone, uh, placed it a fixed distance from the book and slammed the book shop really, really hard. Like several times took the average and then use that as the, as the basic reading. So that was pretty enjoyable to research. Yeah. That's pretty, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty fun too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, there was a lot of, we had a lot of fun making it, but yeah, in terms of the final spread, I think there's a spread on how.
00:30:42
Speaker
Humans and trees have a common ancestor, so therefore the book and the reader have a common ancestor. If you go back, I think it's 1.8 billion years. And so we trace the history of that ancestry kind of back through evolutionary time. You know, the book becomes wood, the wood becomes trees, the trees morph back into earlier species.
00:31:05
Speaker
a tree and fern and shrink down to this kind of single celled ancestor of plants and all animals, 1.8 million years ago. And then we talk about DNA and how DNA encodes information in cells. And then we've been tracing this line right across a two page spread. And then when you get to the end of the line, it says all the DNA in your cells would be two meters long or stretched out or the length of this line. So it's quite a nice kind of journey that it takes you along. And Stephanie created this really wonderful design that
00:31:34
Speaker
I think really showcases the typeface to its best extent. And this line has got a wonderful gradient on it that kind of goes back through all the colors back into history. So I really liked that one. Yeah, that's a good one.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like that was actually the one that I would probably say was one of my favorites, Miriam. But I mean, it's also a really good example of how to get a spread like this right. Miriam could have written the copy in the first instance. I'm pretty sure it did take a bit of back and forth while we were figuring out how to fit the copy on the page, and then also to sort of create a rhythm when you turn the page, and it's still continuing.
00:32:12
Speaker
You know, it's just something that you just couldn't write without seeing it. It required so much iteration and kind of like hitting a tennis ball back and forth in order to get it to this point. So I think that one's a really nice example of just how integrated the process of creating this book really was. One couldn't work without the other, really.
00:32:32
Speaker
Right.
Reflecting on the Book's Creation
00:32:33
Speaker
What's interesting that you sort of compare like you need the physicality of the book, the final product is physical, but you needed that physical interaction in the production process to get to that point.
00:32:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And just to kind of wind back a bit to what Stephanie was just saying about textual rhythm, I mean, that was something that we really spent a lot of time thinking about because Stephanie is a really experienced book designer and has a lot of experience understanding how text will work on page kind of visually, but also, you know, when you read it, how do the line breaks work? How do the letters look? That was a really good experience for me
00:33:13
Speaker
kind of as a writer to actually focus in on those aspects of text in a really, really detailed way. And think about how text and design have this really kind of tight interplay. So I really enjoyed that process. Yeah, just kind of biting the ball back and forth, really. Yeah, it was really good.
00:33:32
Speaker
That's great. Well, it's a great book. My kids and I really enjoyed it. We sat together and read it when we got it. So thanks for that.
Closing and Future Endeavors
00:33:41
Speaker
And thanks to you both. Good luck with everything. It's a great book, and I hope folks will read it. And Miriam, Stephanie, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
00:33:59
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned a lot. And I hope you will check out the new book from Stephanie and Miriam. I am a book.
00:34:08
Speaker
In this season of holiday giving, I hope you will consider supporting the Policy Viz Podcast. Head over to my Patreon page or support the show by spreading it around to your networks, your friends, and your family and letting folks know about it. So until 2021, until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:34:37
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the policy of this podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs, audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs, and each episode is transcribed by Jenny transcription services. If you would like to help support the podcast, please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com slash policies. I have trouble sleeping at night. Eyes took open in a pool.
00:35:12
Speaker
It's so hard to make a mess. It's coming around the bend. It's coming around the bend. Too much noise. Too much life. Too much noise.