Creating an educational book is never just about the words. It’s about how people absorb, retain, and interact with information. When NAFA approached me to design their Guidebook series, I knew this wouldn’t be a standard layout job, it would be a full learning experience on the art of educational design.
1. Designing with the Learner in Mind
Educational books that truly work need more than clean design. They need intentional design.
With the NAFA guidebooks, I was working with large amounts of complex content: not just text, but also charts, imagery, checklists, and tables. Each element had to serve a purpose and live in the right spot, ideally right next to the paragraph that explained it. That’s not always easy when working with strict page counts and layouts.
Then comes reading comfort. The 7×10″ trim size we chose was big enough to allow space for notes, underlines, and marginal thoughts, but not so big that it felt like a clunky textbook. That created another challenge: how do you make the text readable across such a wide page?
The answer: columns.
Columns improve readability, but they also come with their own hurdles. Tables need to span the right amount of space. Images can’t just sit across two narrow columns. White space becomes a precious asset. Each spread became a puzzle to solve.
2. Designing a Cohesive Series
One book is one kind of challenge. A series? That’s a whole other beast.
Each guidebook in the NAFA series needed to feel consistent and recognizable, while still having its own identity. The color palettes had to coordinate but not blur together. Fonts, headers, sidebars, and imagery styles all needed to harmonize. What works for a guide on one topic might feel out of place in another, even within the same series.
Maintaining consistency while adapting to each book’s unique content required constant attention to detail. Small tweaks in tone, length, or visual rhythm meant each layout had to be carefully reconsidered without breaking the visual system we’d built.
3. Designing Beyond the Page
In addition to the books, I also created a slideshow template for instructors to use in the classroom. That part deserves its own blog post (and it’ll get one!), but let’s just say that designing for slides is a completely different animal. Matching visual tone, preventing “death by PowerPoint,” and translating book content into visual talking points, while keeping everything aligned across the entire educational experience, required its own kind of creativity.
The Final Takeaway
This project stretched me in all the right ways. It required thinking deeply about how people read, learn, and teach. It required balancing the big picture (series design, brand cohesion) with the tiniest details (table alignment, column spacing, color consistency).
And best of all, I had the pleasure of working with the NAFA team, thoughtful, engaged, and collaborative every step of the way.
If you’re working on an educational series or need design that helps people truly learn, I’d love to talk.
You can check out the full NAFA series here:
NAFA Guidebooks on Amazon