May 13th, 2012 07:42am
admin
Recently I’d been thinking to myself—lamenting really—that I was not one of those graphic artists who could walk around and see art in everyday things, what they call “found art.” And I am particularly not into staring at type on the street and contributing to the genre of “found type.” I wish I were more of the sort who could look at a sign proclaiming the price of broccoli and see the art in it.
I have, of course, made no bones about my like of formal art training, unless weekly visits of Mrs. Winnamore the Art Teacher to my class at St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn from kindergarten through at least sixth grade count. Even then I never took to drawing and painting, so it’s always with some chagrin that I talk about how book design and page composition may be my contribution to the arts.
In fact, I went through this red-faced reaction yesterday when my wife and I visited the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton yesterday. While donating at the entrance we were also asked (or simply offered on our own) about being members and my wife answered hat we were, indeed, and, in fact, were “Artist” members. At which point I stared to stroll away before the alarm went off, a finger pointed, and someone started yelling, “Can’t draw, can’t paint, doesn’t sculpt … “ over and over.
My wife, on the other hand, is a gifted photographer, has painted and done various multimedia type things in her life. She regularly exhibits in juried art shows and it sounds as if she’s got something big planned with paint and some large, interestingly shaped canvases. I, on the other hand, fish for my next book design projects.
Before we could begin strolling around the Parrish, we were asked whether we would like our own docent to give us “the tour” of the show, and decided that sounded delightful. Which, it turned out, it truly was.
A woman named Julia started by telling us the name of the show was, “EST-3: Southern California in New York.” I admit that I still don’t know the significance of “EST-3,” but I understood immediately the subtitle on the poster above, “Los Angeles Art from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.” Being a college graduate and all, I can still read even though drawing, etc. … well, you know.
The first thing I thought spilled out, in fact, when she referred to the poster and I found myself uttering a sentence with the word “Bauhaus” and mentioning “that Russian,” who turned out to be the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy. The remarkable thing was that Julia immediately knew who I meant and I wasn’t feeling so embarrassed about not remembering the artist’s nationality.
Well, we moved on in the tour and I was reminded again and again that my “home study” of Jan Tschichold was a wonderful investment of time. Particularly when viewing a series of posters by an artist who’s name was prominently placed at the top of said posters and yet escapes me, was I able to discuss die neue Typographie and the influences I was seeing throughout the exhibit.
It turns out—by God!—that I am actually a designer and artist.
April 22nd, 2012 02:48pm
admin
It never ceases to amaze me just how far afield I get from my usual thinking when I’m not overwhelmed by work. Anyone who knows me through this blog or otherwise online, or anyone who simply knows how much I love my part of making books, is probably also aware how when my plate is not overflowing with work(s) in progress, I tend to get edgy, fidgety, antsy, squirrelly—whatever you want to use to refer to the uneasiness I feel when there’s not so much work that it owns me.
For instance, tho’ it wasn’t the reason I began this piece for the blog, in using the word “antsy” in the paragraph above, I reminded myself that I know someone who uses a (I assume) made-up version of the word, yantsy, to mean essentially what “antsy” does. And that led me to look it up in the dictionary—of course, it’s not there—where I found myself lost and wandering for a few minutes.
One of the things I found myself overly interested in, after I finished the work aspect that drew me there was the variety of spine styles—and then the strip options within each style—offered by the printer of one of the two book projects I’m currently working on. I mean, I have worked on both hardcover and paperback books. But I had never gotten overly involved in the details of the printing of any of “my” books.
On this particular book, the publisher is a small city in Texas. The book relates to their centennial and my contact person there is not someone with publishing experience. So I’ve been talking to the printer with some regularity and been involved in decisions on the binding of both a paperback and a hardcover edition of this book. (And it sounds like I’ll begin exploring creating an e-edition of this one, too.)
But I honestly don’t know that I would have continued to explore the subject as far as I have if I were not coming to the end of the two current book projects and I were busier than I am.
March 28th, 2012 09:17pm
admin
Although I continue to harbor reservations about the ability of human readers to change the look of ebooks on their e-reading devices, time has come for me to jump into ebook-making with both feet. To be sure, it gnaws at me that the typefaces I use in my print books will not make it to their e-versions, but it really is time.
So right now, in between projects and/or pieces of projects, I am beefing up my skills by extending my knowledge. First in my learning parade is Anne-Marie Concepcion’s DVD from Lynda.com, Adobe InDesign CS5.5 to EPUB, Kindle, and iPad. This is a fairly painless way, I am finding, to take a step-by-step tour of what you need to do to turn InDy CS5.5 files into epubs.
Of course, as often happens, one thing leads to another and I realize that I need to get up to snuff with CSS, so that I can tweak CSS definitions to adjust how ebook pages will look. The text recommended to me for CSS is HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites. I think, too, that I should brush up on my HTML. So that leads me to something lighter, a series that I had some fun with learning basic HTML years ago, Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 and CSS3 in 24 Hours. But all isn’t right enough with the world to end there. I remain stuck on the thought of how much I hate that all my design choices can be altered on an e-reader. Some ongoing discussion on Twitter and great suggestions from fellow tweeters, under the #eprdctn hashtag, led me to a number of great looking open source typefaces at The League of Moveable Type. I think their Fanwood, Linden Hill, Prociono, Clover, and Sorts Mill Goudy might be very nice text faces. Raleway, League Gothic, and Junction might just lend themselves to some great display work.
That’s how, after all this time, I am really preparing to plunge into the design and layout of ebooks. Any other suggestions most welcome.
March 4th, 2012 12:00pm
admin
A few weeks ago I was asked by a reader of this blog to write some about the differences between logo design and book design. Never having designed a logo, I thought I might not be the best person to offer an opinion. Thinking longer on it, however, I figured at least a few of my observations might make some sense.
Truth is, logos simply never have been my thing. I started with résumés, product literature, and some local supermarket paper display ads. But pretty quickly I got into books and that was all she wrote. So to speak.
The thing I know about logos are that they are usually meant to last a good, long while. Once the identity of a business is established, the owner pretty much wants that identity to take hold and even become ubiquitous if possible. So the process takes longer. It starts with more research and back-and-forth between client and designer. It is very important that they get straight between them exactly the image the client seeks to project. And that requires a pretty good understanding of what the entity does, makes, or sells.
Designing a book, on the other hand, is more of a hit-and-run kind of activity. And one with a more concrete, or at least quicker, deadline. The designer is presented with a book and is faced with the task of setting up how the content of that book can best be given to readers. The image is temporary in a way that a logo isn’t in that once the book has been read, an individual reader is usually done with the book. Additionally, the story is with the reader while the book is being read, but pretty much goes away after the reading is done, except to the extent that the reader is left with a lasting feeling. A logo continues to exist for a going business unless and until it is changed or redesigned.
The only time I can see a single book’s design being more than this “hit-and-run” deal is when the book is part of a series. Then continuity would matter.
What do you think?
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.
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