Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The bird featured on the cover of Outlook Annoyances is a herring gull, one of 43 species of gulls. The herring gull is distributed across the Northern Hemisphere, primarily in temperate climates. These attractive gulls have white heads and breasts, blue-gray mantles, and bright yellow bills, with a single red spot on the lower mandible. They have been called 'vultures of the sea,' because they will eat any piece of refuse, offal, or dead fish that comes their way. They rarely catch live fish, although they often catch shellfish and drop them on rocks or hard ground to crack the shells open. Like all gulls, herring gulls are voracious eaters, and often eat so much that they cannot walk or fly. Sea storms can cause a dearth of food sources, so this gluttony is often necessary for survival for the gulls.

Herring gulls are generally monogamous, although partner changes do occasionallly occur. Nests are usually built on the ground, and the same nesting site is kept for years. Three eggs are usually laid per clutch. The incubation period is 20 to 30 days. Upon hatching, most survival skills are innately known to the chick. The parents bring food to the young and guard the nest, but don't do much teaching. The gulls often return to the place where they reached maturity to build their nests.

Despite their unsavory eating habits, the relationship between herring gulls and humans has often been a beneficial one to the humans. The droppings of these gulls can fertilize soil. For this reason, in 1875, the herring gull colonies on the German islands of Borkum and Langeoog were protected. In Utah in 1848, the crops of Mormon settlers were nearly totally destroyed by a plague of crickets. The crops were saved by the arrival of a flock of gulls, probably herring gulls from California, who consumed all of the crickets. The grateful settlers erected a monmuent to the gulls, which still stands in Salk Lake City. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font. Whenever possible, our books use RepKover, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover's limit, perfect binding is used.

The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 7.0 and screen shots were created in Adobe Photoshop 4.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.