in Design

Actually fired up Adobe InDesign yesterday evening and tried to lay out the rough idea for my SoFoBoMo book. I had been thinking about using blurb's BookSmart software, but it seemed to want to thwart me at every turn. Sure it should just be as simple as dropping pictures on the page and adding some text, but any time you want to add a twirl or a bit of personalisation, BookSmart wants to keep you to the template. So I've decided to head down the custom page layout approach. Try to come up with a simple layout, make pages that way. Then I can either churn out a pdf, or create individual jpgs that can be uploaded to blurb/ shutterfly et al as full bleed pages for their book software. I think that shouldn't be too painful. First major barrier is my complete lack of design sense. But I'm working on that. Second was trying to unlearn all the powerpoint ideas that have seeped into my brain from being an engineer for so long. Slowly getting there. The InDesign interface is still currently an arcane and confusing world, but I managed to knock together a basic, simple layout that I'm reasonably happy with as a starting point. Font choices, colour schemes, style and flair all still sadly lacking, but I think I see a path now. Also missing is any feeling that I'm working at the correct resolutions or have got my head around what size the images need to be at. I think my plan is to work that out then output directly from Lightroom at that size. Probably try to skip any Photoshop localised editing if I can - that's been the way I've been shooting anyway for a while now so I don't think I need to over complicate things just because its a book.