Nancy Creighton – Designer

You’ve done the hard work: you’ve written and edited your book. I’ll take your work and refine the communication with your readers. I’m a reader-centered designer. I don’t do pretty for pretty’s sake—I work to make my layouts pleasing to the eye while getting out of the author’s way. My focus is on visual clarity and flow. If a reader enjoys a book without their mind snagging on something unexpected, that’s when I know I’ve succeeded.

As an artist, I’m interested in doing layout for art books. As a deaf person, I have done a lot of layout for deaf-related projects. My most complex (and one of the most satisfying) is the layout I did for “World Federation of the Deaf: A History,” by Jack R. Gannon. It's a 566-page book spanning 50 years of the WFD. Each decade had several sections with different layout schemes, and almost every page had photographs that I prepared for publication.

A quick run through my gallery images (below) will show you a variety of publications I’ve worked on. The books, in order, are: "From Sweetieface to McGuillicuddy—a Deaf Woman, Her 17 Cats & More;" “Chuck Baird: Deaf Artist Series;” “Anomaly: How I Navigated through Mental Illness With the Help of Some Ghosts;” “De’VIA Ancestors;” “World Federation of the Deaf: A History;” “Let There Be Light: De^Artivism;” and “Pennsylvania School for the Deaf: A Pictorial History.”

The first book mentioned above, "Sweetieface..." is my own. I was always telling my brother and friends stories about my cats. About five or six years ago, I decided to start writing them down. I didn’t have any plan to use these stories, I was just journaling them for myself. I’m primarily a freelance book designer and layout artist these days. When the reviewers at Reedsy critiqued my portfolio and said my work “looked old-fashioned,” I got mad. Didn’t they know that I was working for clients, many of whom were very specific about how they wanted their book to look? “Well, I’ll show them,” I thought, “I’ll just have to do my own book!” That book is the current mainstay of my book design portfolio.

How will we work together? That may concern you because I'm deaf. No worries! I speak, read, and write English expertly, and I'm bilingual having used American Sign Language since 1977.

I have worked on a wide variety of books and titles important to the community I've served. Let me do the same for you!