Mennonite Men is a men's organization for Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA with a mission of Engaging men to grow, give and serve as followers of Jesus. Their work includes connecting groups of men with services projects, with tree-planting, and also provides and promotes retreats for fellowship between groups of men. Together, these programs provide an integrated approach to Christian life—engaging men to grow, give and serve as followers of Jesus.
Strong, Loving, & Wise follows Mennonite Men directors Steve Thomas and Don Neufeld's previous book, Peaceful at Heart: Anabaptist Reflections on Healthy Masculinity, produced by Mennonite Men and the Institute of Mennonite Studies (Wipf & Stock, 2019).
As a collection of stories, Peaceful at Heart presents Anabaptist reflections on being men—with a focus on following Jesus, forming community, and building peace—by sharing a model of masculinity that is more life-giving than today’s dominant version of masculinity. It is about men.
Strong, Loving, & Wise, on the other hand, is not about men but rather a guide for men. Individuals may read it alone, but it is intended for use in groups to engage men in conversation together.
Speaking now personally, this book is a refreshing exception to the fraught genre of Christian' men's literature. It is queer-affirming, acknowledges masculinity and gender as social constructs, and is unapologetically quick to link its many topics of discussion with their wider intersectional connections. It is not founded on conclusions about masculinity, but rather gathers together questions about life and helps men discuss them with each other.
I was approached to design the cover and interior layout and consult on the finer details of content and copy in the course of layout development. After discussing the project further, I was also contracted to illustrate parts of the book. This book is my first major foray into book illustration.
Aesthetically, the client wanted the book to feel relatable and rooted in human experience but also present as an accessible and compact resource, almost like a 'healthy masculinity for dummies.' It would need to be a easily skimmable and useful resource with distinct entries that didn't present as cold or technical. It would also be a challenge to convince potential readers it wasn't just another pithy Christian men's book.
Functionally, the client wanted a print-centric design that could adapt to a wide range of print-on-demand platforms and translate as seamlessly as possible to digital (The client expected the group use nature of the book would involve many digital readers). Cross-references and page numbers would have to match between print and digital versions, meaning it would need to be one versatile design that could fulfill both roles.
With a potentially skeptical audience in mind, we knew the margin for error on the book's first impressions would be high and it would need to prove itself right out of the gate on the bookshelf. I suggested to the client that the design process should involve the feedback of potential readers. To that end, we created three "lookbooks" to workshop with potential readers for feedback.
These three layout concepts where shared with 50 men spanning multiple ethnicities, Christian backgrounds, and ages from the US and Canada. We asked questions about aesthetic preferences and reactions, about usability and format concerns, and also about the respondents' prior experience of Christian literature on masculinity and conversations in Christian communities about masculinity.
The survey helped the client and I confidently select an approach for the book's layout, an illustration style with wide appeal, and provided the final confirmation that "Strong, Loving, & Wise" was indeed a good choice of name.
The most popular lookbook was "The Field Guide," which I created inspired in part by Dorling Kindersley's visual encyclopedias, taking typographic inspiration from Vox Media and the New York Times.
To stretch out and develop the aesthetic into a system capable of handling the whole book, I built out section 6 on its own (the most complex and multi-faceted) to test-run the layout for tweaks and aesthetic fine-tuning before building out the rest of the book.
The illustration style I worked with takes monochromatic contexts in mind. The solid shapes emphasized archetypal postures and emotional states, minimizing references to specific cultural groups, and even downplaying any standard body shape with a subtle hint of androgyny.
Illustration storyboards were created in collaboration with the client and then created into final illustrations in the selected style.
On an iPad, the layout is crisp and perfectly sized.
Proportionally, the design is print-centric, but practically it ended up being easier to add print margins and gutter offsets to an iPad-proportioned design than the other way around. The base document is built in inches, but to the aspect ratio of a base model iPad. The Indesign file combines a common base layer for text and images along with separate layers for digital-only interactive elements and print-only features.
Building files
Creating a digital or print PDFs is as simple as swapping layers and toggling text and object style switches before exporting, with the added step of the intermediary frame when making the final print PDF.
The images below show how the print frame adds space on all sides in the final print version. The digital version is shown printed as well, at size, to show the extra space and tangible differences.
As of December 2021, layout and proofing are complete and the book is pending publication.
Built with love in Webflow.
