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Harvard Law Review Association:
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation Book Design
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation provides lawyers, students, scholars, and other legal writers a comprehensive guide to the proper citing of legal texts. Published by Harvard Law Review Association in conjunction with the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal, the book presents rules of style with pertinent commentary and numerous examples.
The Challenge: Redesign a Traditional Reference Text for Usability
For the 18th edition of The Bluebook, the editors wished to address concerns that the book had become cumbersome and difficult to use as it expanded in scope (to cover international law and electronic media, for example). They asked Dynamic Diagrams to create a new design for the book that would make it easier for its readers to find the information they needed.
Strategically, we needed to make the book equally usable for two broad types of users: legal practioners such as clerks, judges, and practicing lawyers, and legal scholars writing for law reviews. Tactically, we needed to create a consistent but flexible layout that could handle the complexities of the text itself, including tables with both very long and very short lines, sections requiring Asian and Eastern European type, extensive cross-referencing, and other challenges.
Our Solution: Attach Meaning to Every Design Decision
Before beginning any design work, we undertook a thorough analysis of the book's content and audience, including interviews with judges, lawyers, students and other readers. This informed a design strategy that covered the book's organization, layout, and printing, as well as prosaic details such as the need for a more substantial binding and cover than the previous edition.
From our thorough understanding of the "architecture" of the book, we created design styles that clearly differentiated between different content types, such as commentary, rules, and examples. We took advantage of the book's traditional two-color printing to introduce a second text color that set off headings and cross-references, clarified tables, and made the book easier to skim. We also limited the use of blue pages to the "practitioners" section of the book, making this standalone content clearly distinct from the rest of the text.
Based upon a clear plan and close collaboration with all the editors from the different contributing instutions, we helped ensure that the final printed version of the book achieved the goals established at the start of the project.
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