February 1st, 2012 02:29pm
admin
I do not remember the last time I made a mass upgrade of software. Back in 2005, I think it was, I got a PoweMac tower and Adobe CS2, but that’s not what I mean. It came to me the other day, however, that it is high time. So I made my plan …
I finally see the tools for making ebooks starting to show signs of maturity. InDesign CS5.5 has been available for some time. In fact, CS6 is rumored to be around the corner. But it’s Export to epub function, I hear, works pretty well. And Apple’s iBook Author looks—from the demo I saw—like it does what I have asked for, making iPad a serious tool for multimedia ebooks.
I am going to make the move to Apple’s Lion OS. I will install iBooks Author. But since I also want to be able to create works for more than Apple’s iBookstore, the upgrade to Adobe Creative Studio 5.5 is a no-brainer.
I have needed a couple of other new versions, too, for awhile. I always like to have the latest MathType, as Design Science regularly adds increased functionality to the equation creation package; and the latest version makes equations for iBooks. I have been inconvenienced by being able to open .docx files directly in Word 2004 long enough and will also move to Office 2011.
The interesting upgrade would be to QuarkXPress 9. My last Quark upgrade was to version 7.31. A nice story goes along with that. When I worked on the children’s storybook, Mishka An Adoption Tale, some years ago, I had a bit of difficulty with the Chinese printer and fonts. I cannot quite remember what, as the fonts would have been embedded in the PDF and that should have been enough. But I wound up in extended discussions with someone in Quark’s customer relations unit, a great, young woman who helped me work out whatever the problem was.
For some reason, on top of her helping me, she decided she would send me a gift for the trouble I had been put through—none of which was Quark’s fault—and as I was a long and loyal user of XPress, since about 1990. She wanted to send me a CD of extras. I told her that was mighty nice, but that I saw the extras were not usable with my current version, 6.something. She replied that one of the perks of her job was doing nice things for people and she sent me the Quark 7 upgrade for free. Soon after, she left Quark for a dream job of some kind. And I remained a loyal XPress user until more and more clients requested I use InDesign.
I finally added InDesign to my software arsenal. Gradually it just became easier to stick with InDy. Then the other day I got an offer from Quark for a reduced price for version 9—actually, 9.2. What struck me was the inclusion of something called App Studio for making e-versions of books for the iPad. I decided to make that upgeade, too. I had until yesterday, January 31, for the reduced price, after which the cost would climb some. But I wondered whether the nearly $300 investment was worth it for just that module.
Enter Twitter and why you need to know it does not need to be a time-sink. Tweeting on my dilemma led to the information that App Studio is a third-party module available also for InDesign. For free. Now, just as with Quark, there are fees for actually publishing something with App Studio. But the upgrade to Quark … well, is superfluous.
My thanks to Twitter stalwart, gentleman, scholar, and all-‘round good guy Pariah S. Burke (@iampariah on Twitter) who saved me $299 that I can use to get an iPad2 for debugging and displaying iBooks.
January 28th, 2012 03:26pm
admin
I talk a great deal about how I despise crowdsourcing, contests, and predatory jobs boards that encourage freelancers to underbid each other. So I am definitely on the side of not working without a paying agreement in place. But every once in a while a potential client shows up with a possible project that is so attractive and enticing to me that I actually begin to spend time, plan, and even put together some typeface and page samples into a page layout doc.
It’s embarrassing when I find myself ignoring my own paradigm.
Mind you, this does not happen often. But when it does, I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about the possibilities for such a project or even more time trying to turn off my thoughts about a book I have not yet been offered.
Just a few such book design/layout projects are: the mini-coffee table book of photoessays about historic Waco, Texas; a novel containing all kinds of text material besides the straight narrative of the story; a series of health-related texts; a new edition of a community cookbook; and a two-book set based on a father’s letters to his children. Each of these contained challenges that had me sketching page shapes and grids; and each prodded me to print combinations of typefaces that might be used in their production.
The enthusiasm that causes me to break that rule I have against working for free—except for the occasional pro bono project or the book that I am so high on that I take for less than the job is worth—comes about only when I am over-ready for a book to work on and something shows up on my doorstep that I have never quite seen before.
But I am always on guard with my back permanently up against those trying to get free work on something they plan to sell.
January 21st, 2012 11:58pm
admin
Although I still have not updated to Lion and gotten hold of iBooks Author, I managed to read a little more about what Apple’s e-textbook initiative could mean. That has lead to a few more thoughts about Apple’s announcement this past Thursday.
For one thing, it is significant that their new app for making iBooks is called iBooks Author, rather than iBooks Designer. It appears they have no intention of opening another avenue to making ebooks more of an artform a la print books. They are targeting authors and the do-it-yourself movement, making the process easy, if not particularly imaginative or unique for each individual iBook. Of course, they have their own business interests and what I am griping about is not their concern.
I find myself in a peculiar position. I definitely remain a fan of Apple and the Apple way. But I am disappointed when I see them promoting ways and means to a one-size-fits-all ebook design mentality. Then again, I certainly have not gotten as far as investigating how much customization the iBooks Author app allows. My hope is that, for a professional book designer at least, there is a clear path away from the one-size-fits-all that many do-it-yourselfers fall into.
January 19th, 2012 09:50pm
admin
Today’s not unexpected announcement from Apple was about education, ebooks, making ebooks, and making iPad the platform of choice for ebooks. Great good news! I’ve been hoping for all this for some time.
When I was a student it would have been a real blessing to have all my textbooks on an iPad. For one thing, the practical advantage, I would not have had to lug around thirty pounds of books each day. Perhaps more important to me as a student, the multimedia capabilities of the iPad gives access to a wealth of additional material—photos, audio, and video. Linking to newsreel footage when studying current events would have made things a lot more interesting, for instance, as would seeing illustrations of things I was studying in, say, physics class.
And although I have not yet investigated the free authoring tool they also announced today, iBooks author, I am confident that it will prove to be the tool for making ebooks that I have been waiting for. As a book designer, my biggest complaint has been that (human) readers can change the look of their ebooks on ereader (devices). It appears to me that an ebook created via iBooks Author will be something like an app and permanent in its presentation.
Now along with all this good stuff Apple has set off some alarms for me—again, as I am a professional book designer and page composition artist. The same way they set the price of songs on iTunes, they are unilaterally setting the price of the ebooks they will sell. None will cost more than $14.99. I admit that would have pleased me as a college student. But as someone who earns a good part of his living making books, I wonder about them setting the market this way. Will it sustain professional ebook-makers or make the process one that can only be done in an assembly line fashion at sweatshop rates?
Time will tell.
Meanwhile it seems that Apple has come up with a new reason for everyone who is a student or has one at home to buy an iPad if they do not already own one. And because iBooks Author requires Apple’s latest OS, Lion, to run, as my son-in-law tweeted today: “[I]n Macintosh-related news, @StephenTiano gets his reason to update to Lion… #ibooksauthor”. Additionally, it is time for me to replace the first-generation iPad I gave to one of my granddaughters, because I grew bored that it was only good for consuming content, rather than creating. It seems an iPad is necessary for testing and debugging ebooks created in iBooks Author.
Steve Jobs would be proud. Hell, he must have helped prepare for today’s announcement before his untimely death this past October.
January 9th, 2012 09:52pm
admin
Just looking around and thinking about it, I come up with:
- A coffee table book of any of Georgia O’Keefe’s work
- Ditto for Frank Lloyd Wright
- Julia Child’s classic French cookbook
- Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
- The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
- a Bible
- Gray’s Anatomy
- Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
- True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne
- John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works
January 2nd, 2012 10:46am
admin
Amidst all my kvetching about whether or not ebooks would kill the desire for print books, I always seem to miss an even bigger issue: the possibility that all the short-form reading we do nowadays—blogs, emails, texts—is killing our taste for reading books.
That will most certainly dry up any appreciation we have for print books. Worse, the less we read well-thought out, well-written long-form writing, the more likely it is we will no longer learn how to write well.
I just read a book review that began:
It’s not often that I finish a book.
WTF, I wanted to comment, resorting to textspeak.
First of all, the irony of my commenting about the lack of patience for lasting through reading a whole book by using the kind of texting abbreviation that is so common but also a sign of a perhaps growing disinterest in focusing long enough to write well made me laugh. But then I read the rest of the review, which revealed that the writer has little idea what goes into this kind of writing.
No point in insulting anyone, I decided.
Besides, there are still people out here putting all their effort into making us want to read their writing. And these people are working through their writing to make sure it’s done with an eye toward writing correctly and having deliberate reasons for and knowing why when they break grammatical rules, misspell, and punctuate badly. Aren’t they?
So when I think of the book design and page composition work I have done on self-published writing that manages to get it right, writing done well about things I think many readers would be interested in, I wonder if I am just incredibly lucky, this is the last gasp before the barbarians at the gate win, or my concern is an overreaction.
Either way, if someone takes the time to write well and pays attention to what readers want to read, I hope there is also a growing appreciation for how much needs to go into a do-it-yourself effort that looks professional and not one-size-fits-all. This weekend, reading through a lot of material posted by self-publishers and self-publishers’ help companies, I followed a lot of links to see what these books looked like.
Most of them looked the same. Oh, the type and titles and cover art were different; but they all had that—again I use the phrase—one-size-fits-all look. And they were crowing about their work. Many will say—and I admit, as I always do—that I have a vested interest in the continued need for professional, freelance book design and layout. After all, that is what I do. But I got into all this because I love books, reading, and good writing.
I think there is a growing segment of people writing who don’t know writing from a hole in the ground. Yet they somehow find their way to mastering the marketing of mediocre books. This year I am making it part of my work to get involved with books that really make a case for why books matter and why the printed book is more than a container for words.
December 15th, 2011 12:00am
admin
I just tweeted:
I’m very close to dumping LinkedIn. They’re irrelevant to the task I have at hand: expanding my circle of publishing connections.
When I first began using LinkedIn, I thought it was all about the number of connections one made. So I worked at driving that number up, engaging in “open networking”—networking with anyone who would connect; from any field and whether we were total strangers to each other or not. Somewhere along the line I realized that this was the method of human resource professionals looking to fill out their rolodexes. I definitely cooled on LinkedIn at that point, not finding many publishing types or graphic artists on board.
After awhile I noticed I was seeing people I knew from publishing—authors, designers. Artists, editors, indexers—and I began to connect with them. But I already knew these people and so none of that grew my circle.
Next I began to see more of these publishing types who were not people I already knew. They were the ones I most wanted to engage and get to know. My purpose was to discuss the state of publishing, including any new ideas I might pick up about approaching both self- and traditional publishers about freelance book design projects. I began to grow the number of people I knew on LinkedIn from that angle.
Anyone I didn’t know who tried to connect with me and who was not from that publishing world I simply ignored. No need to report them for trying to connect with someone (me) that they did not know. But apparently some people in the same situation vis-à-vis me reported me for not knowing them. Fair enough by the rules. But those rules really do not serve my needs. They make LinkedIn fairly useless to me, not much more than a time drain.
Let me step back. The conversations I have with people on LinkedIn are thoughtful and interesting. But my goals are not advanced and, therefore, the time spent on LinkedIn is not as productive as I had hoped it would be.
Unless I am overlooking something, I see no reason I need LinkedIn to have such conversations. I am willing to be convinced that I should remain. But my deadline for such convincing is Sunday, December 18 at noon.
December 11th, 2011 03:43pm
admin
Working lately on two books by self-publishers, both autobiographies, I reached the point where one was ready to upload to my client’s printer. In this particular case, that meant CreateSpace, the wing of Amazon that provides services, including printing, to self-publishers.
Interestingly, when I uploaded the printer-ready PDFs I had prepared from InDesign files of the interior pages and the back cover/spine/front cover document, CreateSpace’s Reviewer utility sent me error messages—the interior pages file needed fixing. The first, I must admit, was helpful. The Reviewer found two or three of the dozens of artfiles were in the RGB color space, instead of CMYK. In jockeying some art around at the last minute, I overlooked the need to convert them to CMYK, which CreateSpace requires.
Good enough. That was certainly better than having the whole file or just rejection notices emailed back to the client.
But there were still a handful of problems, all the same. Text, the Reviewer noted, was running into the inside and outside margins. Repeatedly. This problem text turned out to be italic, lowercase “effs” at the beginning and end of lines. Take a look at one:
f
Even given that this blog does not display in the typefaces I used for the book, you can see the source of CreateSpace’s problem, although—admittedly—if you’re displaying this in sans serif type the problem may appear faint at best.
The first ones I spotted when looking at the pages the Reviewer utility had singled out were at the ends of lines. See the top of the “f”? It slants rightward, as italic type should. But as the last letter on a full line, principally as part of the word “of,” it did, technically break into the margin.
On the inside part of pages, it happened with words beginning with the letter “f.” Notice how the bottom of is to the left. That was, again technically, into the margin. Of course, we are only talking a matter of a point or two. I mean, if this were the National Football League, and the “f” were a ball carrier, and the margins were the goal line … well, touchdown. But it really is crazy splitting of hairs in typography.
This book has two versions: one where my client-author’s art—mostly photos of his paintings—is in black-and-white, and a second version where the art displays in full color. I actually went back and did some type manipulation to eliminate the offenders.
And still, the Reviewer pointed out, more remained.
Except the “more” turned out to be the roman variety:
f
Do you see it? The crossbar on the left side is what ticked off CreateSpace’s Reviewer.
On this second, the color version, I had had enough. I clicked the “Ignore Reviewer” option and crossed my fingers. As far as I know, there have been no dire mishaps.
October 30th, 2011 01:00pm
admin
I tried earlier, months ago already, to emerge from this fallow period and to start blogging again regularly. Over the last week or so I began to make a list that would hopefully stretch to twenty or thirty pieces. I mean, surely I still have that much to offer anyone interested in book design and making books, particularly self-publishers.
So far, counting the instant piece, I have eleven. I might have said fifteen, counting the four ideas a friend tweeted or Facebook messaged me but that I somehow lost.
- 20 or 30 Pieces I Would Like to Write for This Blog, in which I present some new subjects that get to the heart of book design and freelancing, or in which I discuss some new things I have learned about old topics, all information from which self-publishers might benefit without spending the twenty or so years it took me to learn.
- 10 Books I Wish I Had Designed, a look at just that, maybe showing some sample pages and how I might have made them look. Although it has been said that there are only seven or ten or twelve plots in all of literature, I don’t know that picking ten books I wish I had designed would cover every possibility. But that really isn’t my point
- Sans Serif Typefaces I Might Consider for Body Text in Books would explore something that used to peeve me greatly: how some book designers ignore the “rule” that only serif types ought to be used for booklength stretches of text. Of course, now that I have years and years of this work under my belt, I’m both leery of hard and fast rules, as well as of my own hardline stances. It seems to me that if using a sans for a book’s body text makes that book stand out in a bright, creative way that does not distract the reader, I have served my client in the best way.
- Am I a Luddite for Having a ‘Tude About the Proliferation of Ebooks? discusses my reluctance to design, much less embrace, ebooks. The problem for me is still that the reader can adjust the typeface(s) used and type size.
- When I Blogged Regularly, I Was Busy; When I Stopped … about the benefits of an active online presence to graphic designers selling their services.
- Turning Down Work, in which I would discuss the importance of trusting one’s instincts about how difficult a prospective client might be to work with, and—this is the important point—how, when we work with clients not right for us, we almost guarantee the likelihood that the client’s needs are not met in the best way possible.
- Other Obsolete Art Forms takes the position that print books are on their way out and looks at some other art forms gone the way of the dodo bird.
- What Does It Take to—and How Did I—Become a Book Designer? Where I give up the goods on just how I got to be a freelance book designer and page composition artist.
- Confusing One’s Professional Identity and Promotional Path Online with Personal Voice. I asked an online acquaintance, another publishing freelancer, for some ideas for reaching new prospective self-publishers to offer my services. He pointed out that I discuss a lot of things—food, running, baseball—that don’t really give prospective clients a reason to hire me for book design. I’m concerned that he may be correct and disappointed that being multifaceted may not be of value to prospective clients.
- Am I Affected by Steve Jobs’ Death? I’m concerned about Apple without Jobs at the helm. Will they maintain the Macintosh OS as much of a productivity tool as it’s been to me for over twenty years?
- Writing a Book About Book Design may discuss my using this blog as the foundation for telling the story of how I became a freelance book designer and page layout artist, how I work, what tools I use, how I find work, and each of the books on which I’ve worked.
Well, that is about as much as I have to this point. But, as always, I am open to suggestions if you want to help me with the remaining nine or nineteen.
October 7th, 2011 11:32pm
admin
You could say I would not be the person I am today if not for Steve Jobs. You can certainly say that I would not be a book designer if not for his work and the company he co-founded, shaped, and re-shaped.
The first computer I owned—I got it in 1985—was an Apple IIe. I got it because I liked the way it was styled, not really for anything it could do. I really had no clue what I would do with my Apple IIe, though I began to learn the computer programming language basic. After noodling in basic, I realized there would be no moving on to serious programming languages and actual software development.
My next computer was an Apple IIgs, kind of midway between my old IIe and the original Macintosh (although the Macintosh had appeared already). The firt few models of Macintosh did not appeal to me. I was not enamored of the small screen; I emphatically did not like the all-in-one design. Then someone showed me output from his ImageWriter dot matrix printer and Macintosh. It was far better than what my Apple IIgs produced with my ImageWriter. My friend’s output looked like type, not the dots mine produced. The difference was Macintosh’s ability to “speak” Postscript, the language that brought typesetting and what Steve Jobs had learned about letterforms to desktop computers from that calligraphy class he famously sat in on at Reed College after dropping out.
I know most of what I wrote above is about me, not Steve Jobs, but he made that me possible. So far I have done design and/or layout on about 80 books. He made that possible.
He made this me possible. I thank him and wish him well in this new insanely great moment he just began.
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