The Time Life textbooks of decades past are, while very informative, incredibly outdated. The concept behind the redesign of the Ships textbook was to use as much of the original book as possible, but updating it to reflect a more contemporary audience. All the diagrams were redrawn vectored, and any photographic treatment was fairly conservative. The limited color palette of the book was designed to let the reader focus on the information provided within the book while still creating a dynamic and interesting contrast to the text.