My plan for a field book for myself was becoming more and more real. I'd sat down and thought about the objectives for the book.
- Small enough to carry
- Fits in a half-letter planner cover
- Easy to read text
- Nothing that I didn't need AT an event
- Worksheet to help with Court Reports
What next?
I needed a framework to put things into. So I brainstormed a little about the specific things I wanted to have at an event.
- Scroll texts
- Dais Layout
- Baronial Order of March
- Scripts for various ceremonies
- Something for Tourneys
- Cheat Sheet of questions to ask in a pre-court meeting
- Some pre-written boasts for the Crown
Since this book was meant to be used on the fly during court, a primary objective I had was that the text be clear and readable, and that stuff could be easy to flip to. There are few things I dislike more than watching a herald flip through pages, trying to figure out where the text for the next thing is.
My first target was the scroll texts. In the available book at the time, they were listed in precedence order. Logical for a handbook, I suppose, but NOT easy to find in a hurry, since it required you to remember what level the award was. I put them all in alphabetical order! A revelation! Now it was easy to flip to exactly the one I wanted, with only a few page turns to find it. A few letter tabs, and that would be no more than a second away in court, should I find myself with an unreadable scroll with no gloss, or no scroll at all!
Each scroll text contains a sentence, usually at the end, that lists the place, date and event that the award was given at. These are commonly not read by the herald, since Court is usually opened with these statements. I didn't want to accidentally read that again, as it is tedious for the audience, and redundant. So I decided that I would put them in a different font style so that I had a visual cue where to stop reading.
Now that I had the scroll texts all written up, my next target was the Peerage ceremonies.
This is when I realized that I wasn't writing this little book just for me. The CROWN also needed to be able to use it! It wasn't enough that I could read it. I would be sharing this book with whichever Sovereign I would be standing next to.
Font, layout, and text size suddenly became very important. The book that the Crown reads from during a vigil or elevation is a moving target. You're leaned down, pointing at the section they should read, and because they are the center of attention at that moment, they need to read a bit, and then look up from the book and gaze upon their recipient, or their subjects, and then quickly find their place again to read the next part.
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| "Quit wiggling, I'm trying to read!" photo by Charla Kinzel |
I did a little research on the most readable fonts. It's a general rule that what we read most (serif fonts) is most legible, but size matters! For something that's meant to be read quickly at arm's length in sub-optimal conditions, sans-serif fonts win. It was also a consideration at the time that our King was dyslexic, and I needed my manual to be easily readable specifically for him.
Often times, the ceremonies include stage directions. Having heard heralds inadvertently read them, I knew that I needed to also put those in a different font, so that there was a visual cue that this was not something to be read, or read only to the Crown in sotto voce. And since the Crown needed to easily and quickly find their part on the page, I decided to format the ceremonies so that they were laid out as if they were a script, with labels. All the Crown's parts needed to be bolded, so that they were what leapt off the page most easily. As the herald, my attention would be largely on following the script, but the Crown, as stated before, needs to direct their attention back and forth.
Formatting the text of this book became a large focus on my early work on it, and a lot of thought went into making it as easy to use for the situation that it would be utilized in.
(to be continued...)
