By Chloe Morgan
A Deep Dive with Wanderlight’s Rina Estevez & Jules Moreau
In the softly lit rooms beyond the editorial meetings and book tours, where the clamor of creative ambition yields to the hush of precision, two artisans keep the machinery of Wanderlight Press humming with grace and grit.
Meet Rina Estevez, Senior Print Coordinator, and Jules Moreau, Lead Layout Artisan. Together, they transform manuscripts into physical marvels—each book a tactile act of reverence. What they do is rarely seen. But if you’ve ever run your fingers along a blind deboss on the back flap or paused over the calm elegance of a perfectly spaced chapter opener, you’ve felt their work.
The Architects of Subtle Beauty
Rina, six years into her tenure, describes her craft as a balance of orchestration and restraint. “Beauty lies in precision,” she says. Her days are part logistical triage, part aesthetic stewardship. When a misrouted shipment of offset sheets threatened to derail a binding deadline, she rerouted delivery paths across continents and arranged emergency press checks—all without letting the publication date slip. The result? A perfect release. The average reader never knew.
Her most emotionally resonant moment came when the first box of The Paper Orchard arrived. “The pearlescent jacket shimmered under natural light,” she recalls. “After months of vendor negotiations and cost wars, it felt like holding light made solid.” It’s in these quiet victories that Rina thrives—those moments when all the hidden gears align.
Jules, with seven years under his belt, speaks of design not as ornamentation but as emotional architecture. “Form follows feeling,” he explains. His layouts are rarely loud—but always deliberate. For Eucalyptus Dreams, he wove a subtle leaf motif through the folios and section breaks, a visual whisper that carried the book’s emotional heartbeat.
His most fulfilling project? The Cartographer’s Daughter, which required him to merge nautical map aesthetics with modern readability. He designed custom chapter headers echoing 17th-century charts. “Seeing readers post photos of the interiors,” he says, “was proof that good design resonates beyond the conscious eye.”
Chaos, Calmed
If there’s a throughline in both their stories, it’s this: production is about calming chaos.
Jules once had a licensed font fall through days before press. He sourced a replacement, retuned every kerning pair, and reflowed the layout overnight. “No one noticed the change,” he says. “That’s the point.”
Rina faced a coated paper shortage that forced her to coordinate bindery processes across two states. It required timed deliveries, hourly updates, and backup plans down to the minute. “It’s a dance with catastrophe,” she laughs. “But if you’re good, no one sees you sweat.”
Tools, Tactility, and Trends
Their tools are as refined as their work ethic. Jules lives in Adobe InDesign and keeps a Pantone swatchbook within reach. Rina swears by Enfocus PitStop for print-readiness and an analog planner “because paper remembers what computers forget.”
Both are excited by emerging trends: riso-inspired textures, expressive serif fonts, sustainable foil alternatives. Yet, each insists that craft should serve content. “Design is emotion with discipline,” Jules says. “Production is creativity without ego,” adds Rina.
One of their shared triumphs involved a memoir printed on handmade cotton rag with exposed stitching. “The stock was moody and unpredictable,” Rina says. “But intimate, like holding someone’s diary.” Jules nods. “That book breathed differently.”
Invisible Signatures
When asked what detail they’re most proud of, both mention something barely noticeable. For Rina, it’s a blind deboss motif hidden on a poetry collection’s back flap. For Jules, it’s a folio alignment that mirrors a character arc. Their best work isn’t loud—it’s layered.
Their philosophies reflect that. “A perfect production day is quiet,” Rina says. “Proofs pass. Files fly. The phone rings with approvals.” Jules adds, “It’s rhythmic. Café con leche in hand, classical guitar playing, everything just flows.”
Why It Matters
Publishing is full of visible moments—launch parties, blurbs, buzz. But for every book that reaches your hands feeling seamless and sacred, there’s a silent team weaving art into infrastructure. Rina and Jules don’t just make books—they craft experiences designed to disappear behind the story.
So next time you crack a Wanderlight spine and feel something unnameable yet whole—pause. Somewhere behind the curtain, two artisans are already at work on the next one, balancing beauty and logistics, form and feeling, with tools in hand and hearts tuned to the rhythm of the page.
#WanderlightBehindTheScenes #BookProduction #DesignMatters #PrintingArtistry #PublishingMagic
