Honey & Gold
What this engagement required.
Honey & Gold is a devotional by Pastor Joshua Thompson of Legacy City Church, written to walk readers through every chapter of the Bible. The scope of the publication design engagement matched the scope of the book itself: 686 pages, two testaments, every book of the Bible, every chapter treated with consistency and intention from the first page to the last.
The engagement produced the hardcover first edition, a reformatted paperback Gospel of John excerpt with journal pages, and a reflowable ePub edition. Each format required its own set of design decisions. Together they form a complete publication system built around a single identity.
Cover Design
The cover is built on restraint. A deep black field. Key art supplied by the author, gold bars pooling into honey, centered and floating with no competing elements. The title is hand-lettered script drawn by the author's wife, set above a clean serif subtitle and author name. The result is quietly authoritative. The back cover carries the drop cap treatment and the bee and gold bar ornamental illustrations that run through the interior, connecting the exterior design language directly to what the reader will find inside.
Interior Design and Typesetting
The interior is set entirely in Baskerville, with size, weight, and capitalization used to distinguish three levels of hierarchy: testament, book of the Bible, and chapter. Each chapter opens with a drop cap set in Academy Engraved LET, the only departure from Baskerville in the entire publication. A small ornamental illustration of a bee and gold bars, developed in collaboration with the author, appears at the start of each book of the Bible.
Achieving that consistency across 686 pages required significant typesetting work. Font size, baseline grid, and margins all had to be optimized simultaneously, tight enough to manage page count, open enough to remain readable. A second edition was later reformatted to a 7x10 trim to meet Amazon KDP's hardcover page count printing limits.
Gospel of John Excerpt Edition
A 94-page paperback produced as a special excerpt from the main volume, covering only the Gospel of John. Trimmed to 5.5x8.5", it follows the same cover identity at a reduced scale. Each chapter is followed by three journal pages built around six prompts written by Pastor Thompson. The edition was produced for a specific purpose: sent as a thank-you gift to donors of the Leaving a Legacy radio program.
ePub Edition
A reflowable ePub was produced alongside the print editions. Drop caps were removed due to environment and device inconsistencies that could not be worked around. Additional custom CSS was written to handle styling that the export process could not produce on its own. Website development expertise meant that going into the ePub's underlying structure directly was a natural extension of the engagement rather than an obstacle.
All product photography featured on this page was shot and edited by Kaiser Creative and provided to the client for product and marketing use.
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