The Trail Museum & Archives commissioned me to design and lay out the second volume of A Trail to Remember, a community oral history project compiled by author John D'Arcangelo to commemorate the city of Trail's 125th anniversary. The book collects memories, recollections, and reflections from residents past and present, organized across chapters dedicated to subjects like sports, education, youth, pastimes, and working life, each built from individual contributions, letters, and personal stories submitted by members of the community.
The finished book runs 384 pages at a trim size of 7" x 9", with a 16-page photo insert. I was given the manuscript, the dimensions, and the page count; the visual language of the book was mine to build from scratch, including all paragraph and character styles, typesetting, chapter titles, subtitles, body copy formatting, and photo captions. All edited content was supplied by the Museum & Archives, with proofing and markup handled on their end. The full layout was built in Adobe InDesign, with photo editing done in Photoshop, primarily contrast, sharpness, and clarity adjustments on older black-and-white images.
The central challenge was fitting the entire manuscript within a fixed page count. Every decision about font size, leading, margins, and spacing had to be weighed against the cumulative effect on pagination, requiring constant adjustment and forward planning throughout. Beyond the count, I ran systematic searches to enforce consistency across the full manuscript: standardizing hyphen, en dash, and em dash usage, time formatting, italicization of media titles and submitted letters, and indentation styles, while monitoring for widows, orphans, and runts and making targeted adjustments to resolve them cleanly. Balancing the photo insert, and honouring the museum's specific request to rotate the landscape-oriented opening and closing images sideways to maximize the available space, added another layer of careful planning.
The cover presented its own challenge. The archival street photograph, provided by the Trail Museum & Archives and wrapped front to back, contains significant tonal variation across its surface, making clean type placement difficult. Subtle shading on the white title text was the solution, allowing the lettering to hold against both the light and dark areas of the image without competing with the photograph beneath it. Logo placement for the City of Trail, the 125 Years of Trail brand, and the Museum & Archives on the back cover rounded out the design.
A Trail to Remember, Vol. II became available for purchase at the Trail Museum & Archives in June 2026.
