Savvy Executive

A network is a chain of connections, each person a single link. I made that the book’s one repeating shape – a row of links, one picked out in red, under every chapter number. Then I gave it a second job.

The cover, on the shelf – the chain in grey and red under the title, subtitle below it, author name on the red plate at the base.

A chapter opens on the chain, the number in red above it, the title in large grey sans, and an epigraph held between two oversized quotation marks with the author’s name in small caps under a rule. Then the serif starts on a red drop cap with the first few words in small caps – I wanted the eye to have somewhere to land before the measure closes over it.

The chain reappears as links under the red chapter number, an epigraph below it, the body opening on a red drop cap.

The mechanics the foreword refused to centre still had to live somewhere, so I penned them into a tinted box with rounded ends and a tab at the corner carrying two links, one of them red – the chain again, this time as a label. A reader chasing strategy can skip every one of them; a reader who wants to be told which button to press can find them without reading anything else.

I ran the page at two widths. The argument takes the full measure, and anything subordinate – an enumerated setting, a worked example – is indented into a narrower one, so the hierarchy is visible before a word is read. Red I rationed to the things that mark a place: the chapter number, one link, the drop cap, the subheads, the pull quotes, and the folio tab at the foot of every page.

The last chapter is a self-assessment, so I set it like one: checkboxes, hairline rules between items, grey sans subheads carrying the chapter each question came from. A hundred pages of justified serif, and then a worksheet the reader is meant to write in.

The client later rebuilt the whole company’s brand on this design. That is the test a motif either passes or it doesn’t – a decoration stays on the object it was drawn for, an idea can be lifted off it and still work.

The book itself is on BookAuthority’s Best LinkedIn Books of All Time list and became a C-Suite Book Club Featured Selection. Those judge what Kaemmerer wrote, not how it was set.

The second edition thanks me by name in its acknowledgements. Shown as the page rather than retyped – she was complimenting the typography, and the compliment is set in it.

Acknowledgements, second edition – the credit line thanking the book’s designer, set in the printed page’s own serif type.