I'm a creative book designer with 30+ years of experience who loves designing beautiful books to fit the needs of the author, publisher, and the reader.

 I'm a very detail oriented designer with experience working for a variety of publishers, big houses and small presses. I can’t pigeonhole myself to one genre because I’ve had too many manuscripts cross my desk that have been a joy to work on. I have worked in the fields of trade, textbooks, scholarly, and more recently the expanding field of self-publishing. In fact...shhhhhh...I have self-published, under an assumed name, nine books showing some of my vernacular photography collection.

I work well with my clients and often they stay with me for years, in some cases, such as McGraw-Hill and the University of California Press, for decades. I am dedicated to getting the job done and pleasing the client. I'm easy to work with. I want the design and typesetting of your book to set the mood for what you've written, to entice the reader to want more.

 I live north of San Francisco in a lovely old apple orchard where botanist Luther Burbank once tread.

 Click on the list to the right 
to see examples of my work.

As you can probably tell from this site, I'm not interested in impressing anyone with my web skills. I enjoy designing books, something tangible you can hold in your hands, something you can pass along to family and friends.

Telling someone I'm a book designer when they ask what I do has drawn a lot of strange looks over the years.

 “So...ummm...you do the covers?” 
“Sometimes.”

 Blank stares.

 “I also decide where the page numbers go.” 

 More blank stares.

It’s a confusing profession to people outside the business, but what I provide is integral to the reader's enjoyment.

I love designing the interior of a book, taking a manuscript page and turning it into something special. My preference is that the cover/jacket work in unison with the interior to make a complete package. Who wants to open a Snickers bar and find out there’s sawdust inside?

People only spend a few moments looking at the cover of a book, but they spend hours with the interior. The design should help the reader understand the content of the book and the author’s perspective.

 Contact me via email and we'll discuss turning your manuscript into the book you imagined it could be.

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CLIENTS (partial list of current and past)

SELF-PUBLISHED
Personal History Productions
Sort Your Story (manual for genealogy software)
SCHOLARLY
University of California Press
Lynne Rienner
Marcus Garvey Papers
Latin American Center/UCLA

TEXTBOOK
McGraw-Hill
Bedford/St. Martins
Cengage   
Harcourt College
ABC-CLIO
Cheng-Tsui
Benjamin Cummings
South-Western
Boyd & Fraser
Roberts and Company
Prentice-Hall
MacmillanMerrill

TRADE
Berrett-Koehler
Hoover Insitute
PoliPoint

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 EDUCATION
BFA in Graphic Design / California College of the Arts 
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AWARDS
1987* PRINT Design Annual
COBOLBurgess Communications/Macmillan
cover
1997 Bookbuilders West
BUILDING BRIDGES TO ACADEMIC WRITING
Mayfield Publishing Company
cover
1999 Bookbuilders West 
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
Mayfield Publishing Company
cover
1990 AAUP (American Association of University Publishers)
Book, Jacket, and Journal Show
MASKS OF THE SPIRITUniversity of California Press
interior
 1991 Chosen by University of California Press as a Centennial Book
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRANÇOIS RABELAISUniversity of California Press
interior
2006 Bookbuilders West
ART ACROSS TIMEMcGraw-Hill
interior





* Incorrect design credit information was submitted to PRINT by the production manager at the publisher. The publisher discovered the error and a correction was published in a later edition of PRINT.