Sweeping the Rounds

book design, illustration

Timeline: 6 weeks (Fall 2019)

For book design class, I wrote and designed a book intended to serve as an introduction to the sport of curling. The 96-page product is told through the lens of my personal experience within the sport, and uses old photography from my local curling club.

The Idea

Curling is a sport that’s very dear to me. During my many years playing the sport, I noticed two things. Firstly, that the materials used to teach people about curling tend to be very dry and somewhat intimidating. In our curling club, the rules of the game were written out in five unbroken columns of text on a huge poster, with very little hierarchy and no visual accompaniment whatsoever. Books published about curling are often just pages upon pages of black text on white pages, with the occasional black-and-white diagram to illustrate a point. The second thing I noticed was the general unawareness of the sport, and the mild disdain for it in those who did know a bit about it. The main complaints I heard from people were that it was boring, dry, or too complicated to follow. To remedy these two things, I set out to create a visually appealing and easy-to-read beginner’s guide to curling.

Research

In preparation for this project, I perused a variety of bookstores and looked at their selection of curling books, their sports books, and their selection of instructional books on any given topic. I paid close attention to how each book categorized its information, how they paired visual aids with written points, and what aesthetic choices were made in the design of each.

The Layout

Curling books and rule posters often feature walls of text that occupy most, if not all, of the available space on a page. To make the information more digestible and less intimidating upon first glance, the info for this book was generously paced, with many pages and spreads having plenty of breathing space around the content to let the reader process the information. Sometimes a page only has a small paragraph of text, and this was done to emphasize the importance of the explained concept. The book is also divided into a series of chapters, beginning with the basic information and gradually moving into more complex and obscure details in order to create hierarchy and a sense of progression.

The Visuals

The use of bold colours was intended to combat the notion of curling being a very serious and dry sport, and to make the book more friendly and inviting upon first glance. Blue and red were chosen because these are the colours most commonly seen within the game. For visual aid, a combination of illustration and photography was used. The photos are from my curling club’s old albums, which further emphasizes the local curling scene rather than focusing on the highly technical professional scene. The latter, paired with my personalized narration in the text, is done to make the sport more approachable.