around the bend

Finished off my SoFoBoMo book this evening, right on the last day to get it done. I put more effort into the pictures this time around but quite a bit less into the book design. I borrowed heavily on the work I did last year for the layout and inDesign templates, although I've sized it for a blurb 11x13 book. Not sure I'll get around to it any time soon, but the book is done! You can download the version from SoFoBoMo.org, or flick through the Issuu presentation. I prefer the pdf version, if I had to choose. All images, editing and layout done in the last 31 days.

Twelve thoughts on PDF for Photography

About 12 days left until the first possible day to start a SoFoBoMo book for 2009. I've been sharing some email with Brooks Jensen, the editor of Lenswork, on his experiences with using PDF for photography. He was kind enough to write down some of his thoughts, that you may find useful. Brooks has been using PDF for a while, particularly for the publication of Lenswork Extended and has some intriguing ideas.

Twelve Thoughts on the PDF for Photography

Brooks Jensen

As a creative artist, I reflexively resist any time someone tries to tell me what to do—so this article is not that. On the other hand, I've learned that learning from someone else's experience can be a valuable way to learn, in and of itself. So, with Gordon McGregor's encouragement, I offer a few thoughts from my experience as the publisher of LensWork Extended relative to the new medium of PDF publishing. It will, of course, be up to you to decide whether to follow the suggestions or consider them rules to be broken—with vigor!

1. Monitors are horizontal (more correctly, landscape orientation), and so, too, should be PDFs. It's a ridiculous waste of screen real estate to make a vertical (portrait orientation) publication in a horizontal world.
2. Use Acrobat's "full screen mode" for PDF publications. Why clutter up the screen real estate with software menus, scrollbars, and other superfluous visual clutter in a presentation like a publication of photography that is supposed to be visually sophisticated.
   
3. In full screen mode, viewers will need navigational aids which you will have to provide them in your layout—next page, previous page, jump to another section, etc. This will take up screen real estate, but at least can be designed in any way you want, using any aesthetic you want, and fully integrated into the layout and design of your publication—a significant advantage when compared to the restrictions of the built-in software navigation menu bars and arrows provided by Acrobat reader. Don't forget that navigation can be transparent. With JavaScript, it can even pop visible on mouse-over!
   
4. Speaking of remember navigation, that unlike physical books PDF is a nonlinear navigational challenge. There's no reason to think someone needs to view a PDF in page sequence—in fact there might be a great reason to assume that they won't. Be sure to take this into account when designing your PDF publication.
   
5. In the nondigital world, it is universal that people will get close to a photograph or a book to see more details. In the PDF world, using the zoom tool, viewers can zoom in beyond anything imaginable in a photographic print. If you want them to have this ability, be sure to create your PDFs with enough resolution that allows people to zoom in without the images pixelating. Screens only need 72 dpi, but to allow for zooming, you might want to use 200 dpi instead.
   
6. Unlike a physical book, PDFs don't have to consist of equal sized pages. Some pages can be vertical, some horizontal, some large, some small. What can you do with this idea?
   
7. Obvious as it seems, PDFs are not books. It's best not to think of them as "digital books," but rather as their own unique publishing venue. So, think beyond the book; think audio, think video, think links, think links to the Internet, think layers.
   
8. Speaking of layers, this is one of the most under-utilized and most interesting aspects of PDF publishing. If you create a layered document in InDesign, you can export the InDesign document to a layered PDF and then include hot buttons that turn off and on various layers. Think three-dimensionally.
   
9. PDFs also break a temporal barrier. Unlike physical books, it's easy to update a PDF. Most commonly, updates would be some form of correction—fixing a typo, for example. But what about projects that incorporate a temporal update as part of the project? Maybe a story that unfolds over time? Rather than a publication date, what about publication range?
   
10. To produce sophisticated PDF publications, learn about named destinations, bookmarks, buttons as well as links, renditions, the advantages and disadvantages of embedded versus linked media, page transitions, the document information dialog box, keyword searching, watermarks, opening parameters, password protection, full screen mode, tool tips, color management, and, if you're really adventurous, embedded JavaScript.
    
11. Don't forget that the many sophisticated computer folks now use widescreen monitors—an unbelievable blessing for panorama format photography.
    
12. Always embed fonts. Always embed fonts. Always embed fonts. If you can't embed fonts, convert them to outlines.

We are clearly in the early stages of learning how to use this new medium for the publication of photography, but what an exciting potential it has for the distribution of our work and for some very engaging and unique experiences for our viewers. For all you SoFoBoMo participants, good luck and have fun!

valid concerns

Paul Butzi raises some valid concerns about any attempts to move away from the bookishness of books, when considering the design of a PDF photographic book. I'm not proposing ripping up and throwing away everything that has gone before, but I do think some of the assumptions are worth investigating. The computer screen is different to a book. The way we interact with documents on a screen is quite different. As a result, the design and presentation should maybe try to reflect that, not just emulate directly what went before.

I think Paul's cringing at the history of desktop publishing is well founded. However, that particular genie is already out of the bottle. The reason that things got so bad there for a while was that the personal computer democratised the design process. You didn't have to go to a professional designer to type up or design the flyer for your garage sale. You could do it yourself, with all the good and bad aspects that brings along. That problem already exists within photographic book publishing. Blurb, Lulu, iPhoto, et. al., already pulled that cork out. They try to contain the damage to a certain extent by providing generic templates that enforce a particular book flow, but there is nothing to stop you going alone - many people did last year for SoFoBoMo. Full bleed layouts, done in design software, exported as a full page and then dropped into the POD software lets you do what you like, for good or ill. If you are planning on doing your own layout for SoFoBoMo, I'd urge you to expend a little bit of effort and learn some basics of good design and typography. If you want you can read about my experiences trying to learn the fundamentals of book design and typography from last year. There are some book recommendations along the way. In particular, if you want to see how bad my early efforts where, they are still here. Maybe that's the first lesson - PDFs don't go out of print.

So I don't think considering the change of medium from physical book to PDF really is concerned with that other orthogonal concern of bad design or lack of knowledge. Bad design is bad design, irrespective of medium. Where it gets interesting though is if you bring a good design principle forward to a medium where it becomes less optimal. Paul's example of the Kindle and its lack of spatial search-ability is one of my main frustrations with digital books, in a ebook reader or on a screen. If form is to follow function, then maybe we should reconsider some of the layout and design principles. I have a Safari account with O'Reilly. For a book reading geek like me, it should be a constant treasure trove of new things to read. It always looks that way when I browse through, but something stops me. I just can't read books on a screen the way I can curled up in a chair, or lying in bed, or anywhere else I can enjoy a good book. The Kindle tries to go someway towards addressing that, but it really just isn't there yet. I think the real future and goal of the Kindle is tied up in its name. Something better will eventually arrive. But for now, the Kindle isn't a graphical display and not really a suitable target for a PDF photographic book, so lets put it to one side.

If I tire quickly and can't read books in PDF on a computer screen, is the same principle at play when looking at photographs? Should we take that into account? The resolution between a computer screen (72-96 dots per inch) compared to a printed document (300 to 600 dots per inch) is quite different. Maybe that factors in. Then again, with a PDF you can zoom in and out, so maybe again we need to reconsider the resolution we share images at - should be size them for a 100% view, or consider providing something much higher resolution that a viewer can zoom into and explore? Do we care about protecting those high resolution images, or not? In terms of layout, a screen seen as a page presents one full spread at a time, not two facing pages. But maybe that screen can be viewed as a window onto a much larger space and pictures laid out differently as a result.

Most of these ideas are half-formed (and that's being kind) but PDF books on a screen are a different thing to a physical book. I think it is worth considering that carefully and designing appropriately. Hopefully without using Comic Sans.

the medium is the massage

(and no, the title does not have a typo in it) Continuing on from the previous post, what I'm really interested in is how to design a PDF photographic book to best take advantage of the medium. That's opposed to my previous approach of cloning and copying everything I could find that made a photographic book a real book - two full spreads of title page - one plain, one ornate (seems to be a canonical form of a photographic book - check and see how many of yours have the same structure at the front). A colophon page, facing page layouts designed to work together, all these things that are constrained by the printed medium that I tried to copy and bring forward into a PDF.

This time around I want to consider more the design of the book for a PDF, rather than as a segue to a printed copy. McLuhan's tetrad of media effects might be good way to explore this. At least I can use it to think about what a PDF might contain, so I can then think about what it should contain. Really these questions are about the difference between electronic media, presented in PDF vs a physical book. I'm not so interested in making it interactive, I am more concerned with how to design and layout the result to take advantage of the features on offer.

   1. What does the medium enhance?

   2. What does the medium make obsolete?

   3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

   4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

Much of this also expresses the things I don't particularly like about the Amazon Kindle - it tries too hard to look and feel like a book, but along the way loses many of the things that make a small paperback book so successful as a medium. Being able to flick quickly through pages. The ability to take it anywhere, use it anywhere.

pdf design

Some links for now. All about magazines in PDF format and I realise my book isn't a magazine. Interesting to look at for the design aspects (more than the content) of how or if they adapted print magazine conventions to PDF display.

Smashing Magazine's list of inspirational PDF magazines

Ubiquitous PDF

PDF mags

back to basics

I talked to a friend at the weekend who works with a lot of alternative photographic processes and equipment. He has an eclectic array of different film and digital cameras and makes some beautiful images. This time he walked in with a large box under his arm. Proudly he showed off the prints he'd been making with this several foot square cardboard pinhole camera that he'd made. It was fascinating. The negatives were about 2 foot by 3 foot, made directly on photographic paper, through a small brass pinhole on the side of the box. He used a magnetic shutter (well, a thin fridge magnet) to make the box work and sealed it up at home prior to going out and shooting his one, large frame. The camera is the big green box in the shot below. He estimated that the pinhole was probably about an f256 aperture and the image was sharp right across the plane. There was a concave film holder at the back of the box (a flexed piece of card). The simplicity and elegance of the entire camera fascinates me, compared to the technical and electronic marvels that many of us use. The shot at the top of this post is another of his images, this time taken with a pinhole camera made from a tin can. It isn't perfect, but there is a charm and character to the image that is absent from a lot of the technically perfect but less than exciting digital imagery that you can find around. More than that, there is a magic to it - a tin can and some light sensitive paper and a bit of chemistry and you end up with an image. It reminded me of the room-sized camera obscura that is shown in one of the genius of photography episodes. A team rent a hotel room in Rome, across from a famous church. They black out the windows, install a small aperture as the only place that light can enter the room, then watch and wait until their eyes adjust and a perfect, beautiful, inverted and reversed image of the church across the street appears on the opposite wall. Magical. I've enjoyed similar effects from small holes in the window blinds in my bedroom, watching the early morning sun dance small images of the trees in the garden across the wall. We also got to talking about various larger sized camera obscura and one image stood out as particularly whimsical. He mentioned someone who sensitises paper across the entire back side of a large pin-hole camera then is actually inside the box during the exposure, dodging and burning the image as it is formed, from inside the camera. Using their whole body to block and shape the light hitting the paper. It just seems such a wonderfully organic way to interact with the print that I'm fascinated. Perhaps even more so because I've never even experienced the basic process of printing a black and white image in a darkroom - something I want to try, before it all disappears.

sofobomo : covers again

For those of you finishing up a SoFoBoMo book, cover design might be one of the last things you've been thinking about. If you are looking for ideas, Blurb's blog has an interesting entry and links to a variety of articles and sources of inspiration for cover design.

Still alive

I'm still alive but mostly exhausted by the whole book process. I finally finished soft proofing all of the images for a Blurb version of the book. That took most of Saturday morning, to produce a new version of everything then relink to the soft proofed images. Got it laid out and uploaded to Blurb and a printed version should hopefully be arriving in the next week or so. I'm excited to see the finished version and perhaps more excited just to be done, for now. Other SoFoBoMoers are finishing up around now. I've seen several excellent results popping up. I particularly was taken by Paul Butzi's walk around his home with his dog. The words and pictures flowed together really well and there were a few good insights shared along the way. The other Paul, Paul Lester, also shared a beautiful look around a small glen, close to home. Getting to experience his Taoistic approach to arranging the images was a delight. Looking forward to seeing the other books as and when they arrive. I haven't taken a picture since the last SoFoBoMo shot. Almost have a couple of times but the urgency isn't there for now. I did wake up on Sunday morning with a fully fledged, fully visualised idea in my head that I'd love to follow through on. That hasn't happened before - I can really see the image in my mind's eye. All the details. How I'd like it to be lit, what the colours would be, how it would work. I know the story and what the concept is. It even has scope to be an entire other project - a series of conceptual images. But I'm daunted. Daunted by the thought of trying to put it together. Daunted by the work required to pull it off. Scared it might not be as good as it still is in my mind's eye. Unsure why I'd spend the money required to make it happen, with no general point to doing it. All sounds silly after I've typed it out. Mostly though, I just feel tired of the whole thing for now. I need to recharge. Another indication that that's true: I went to set up the camera to play around with some stroboscopic shooting and I've stripped the tripod thread. So no tripod shooting until I can get that repaired (anyone know what the cost is?). I'll take that as a sign to slow down for now and enjoy some other things. Reflecting on the whole SoFoBoMo effort - I'm amazed at how much I learned, in such a short period of time. Adobe InDesign from scratch, in a few days. The ins and outs of basic typography and layout, enough that I could at least understand all the mistakes I'd made when Holly pointed them out. Enough to have not made many more along the way. Insights I gleaned about how a book should be structured. The front pieces and how they relate. The application of graphic design and the torture of trying to come up with a passable design. The issues around layout of pages and display of images. The struggle to take enough images and then to have enough good ones. The always twisted writing process. How little I enjoy editing what I've written after the first draft. The great sense of shared purpose between all the people participating. The fun and excitement of sharing your book with someone for the first time. It certainly makes me want to do it all again, some time soon. I'm just not sure if I can face up to trying to do another one in May. Going to mull it over for a few more days.

SoFoBoMoFinito!

I'm finished! I suppose I have another week left if I wanted to use it, but it is done. The final edits have been reviewed and the PDF version (3.5Mb download) is available. I've also made it viewable here through Issuu in their flash viewer. I actually really like that presentation, particularly if you use the Fullscreen option in the menu bar of their browsing tool to remove all the stuff around the edges. Works well in Firefox, will be interested on feedback on that. I know some people dislike flash with a passion (please feel free to enjoy the pdf version!). I'm going to wait a few days and see if I get some feedback before starting the soft proofing process to make an actual book. Amanda was generous enough to read through it all and read it out loud to check how the text flowed. That was a fun experience. I've already had some feedback on potential issues with how some of the red on black text might not print successfully. Anyone have experience with that ? Any other feedback, comments or opinions are also very welcome on this, my first photography book! ETA: I've updated the two versions based on feedback from Holly Sisson. She was kind enough to look over the first version and find all of my typographical mistakes, giving me about three pages of corrections for the four pages of text that are in the book! I certainly appreciate her attention to detail and have adjusted the layout accordingly.

sofobomo : cover story

I've got eight days left to wrap this thing up (that's what I get for starting a bit early I suppose). The drop dead date is next Tuesday but I think I'll have everything bundled together and finished by the weekend. I'm reading other blogs and suddenly remembering about the sequencing aspects of it - this last week I've just been focused on finishing shooting and then creating individual double page spreads. Haven't given any real thought to how those pairs of pages go together. The idea of chapters had drifted out of my head completely. I think I might have two broad sections to group the people into and that's about it. Shooting is done. InDesign template and page design is essentially done. Colin was talking about covers. I realised over the weekend that I probably need to do three versions of the cover. There's the general layout out of the front page to think about, but then there are different versions - the web version that will represent the book, that hopefully people will click upon. Then there's the front page for the PDF version. I have some 'dust jacket' text that I want to place there, at least it'll be on the back of the real book - but should it be on the 'back' of the pdf ? On the left of the cover in the way it would be printed and wrapped around the book ? It is something that really should be read before reading the rest of book - should it get a page to itself in the PDF layout, then move to the back page of the real printed edition ? Same with a bio blurb - it'll go on the inside flap of the dust jacket in the real book, but where does that live in a PDF rendition ? Then of course there is an argument to be made for changing the font size between the web and print version. 10pt at 300dpi is a very readable printed resolution. Bit tougher to read at 72dpi on a screen. 12pt at 72dpi is the standard readable screen resolution, but doesn't look anywhere near as good printed. Anyone got thoughts on this one ? None of these are particularly earth-shattering decisions, but they all add to the things to tweak and get right. The font one might be the most thorny if you are really being picky about the presentation.

sofobomo : more layouts

I'm finding this part of the project the most painful. The shooting was a lot of fun, but now the editing and assembly is starting to drag. The images are mostly edited down and finished, so I've gotten over the hump of that. All I have to do is put them together in some sort of coherent and stylishly designed way. Or maybe just coherent and designed.

Hmm. This is all new. Anyway, here are some more sample layouts that I put together last night. Feedback as always is very welcome. With the realisation that each page doesn't need to be the same as long as they are somewhat related and consistent, the layout design became a much bigger issue than just dropping pictures on the page. Mostly that came from the understanding that just having the exact same layout and number of images on each page would be really boring. As I shot, I also found that some people were more expressive and willing to act up, giving me more material than others. Consequently, some pages deserve more images than others.

Both of those decisions increase the thought that goes into each page - how to lay it out, how many pictures to use, how to size them and so on. I'm trying to just let it flow and keep some design elements to pull it all together - the deep red blocks, white space. Making slow progress with this.

sofobomolimbo

The layout is mostly done. I kept it simple, a 6x6 underlying grid and then tried to align most of the elements to that in something of a consistent way. I like how it looks for now. The fonts are mostly settled. The text is written. A big chunk of the photos have been taken. Now all I have to do is start editing them, pick them, finish them off and start pulling it all together. One consideration I haven't quite got to grips with yet is when to do colour proofing and adjustment if I plan on doing blurb output. Do I lay out the images on the pages and then proof the entire page, or proof each image individually and then re-embed them. Any thoughts ? I can see that doing the images on their own will lead to more work and probably better results. If I embed them I run the risk of tweaking the colour for layout elements as well, so each page would be subtly or not so subtly different which will probably look bad. But if I do each image on its own, I'll basically have to lay the whole thing out twice. That doesn't seem right, either. (Once for a web ready, web proofed version and one as a print ready, soft proofed version). Must be missing something, I hope. Other than that, I'm feeling a bit blah. Got a cold or similar and can't seem to shake it. Isn't making me want to get out and shoot too much. Still, plenty of time! That and we finally filed our taxes for the year. Woohoo!

sofobomotypo II

Font choices. So many choices. TrueType fonts, OpenType fonts, thick, thin, serif, san serif, slab serif, modern, old style, readable, legible. I was starting to get into that spiral of not being able to make a decision. The whole thing about SoFoBoMo is that there really isn't time for that. So I knocked together some samples and came up with something that I like. I knew I wanted to move away a bit from the tired, overused, built-in fonts. Didn't want to use Times New Roman. Didn't want to use Arial. Helvetica seems a bit played out and maybe tricky to work with. Comic Sans was calling... I found a few good resources for free fonts, online. Smashing magazine had a great list of 40 free fonts and I picked up several of them. Lots of good options out there. District Thin is attractive and clean. Anivers is lovely, as is Diavlo. I really like Museo but particularly wanted the light and heavy weights which aren't available for free. I downloaded a few of these, made up some sample pages and printed them out. It was much easier making the final choices from hard copy samples. They looked quite different on the screen and the font sizes made more sense printed. I ended up picking M+ Outline, which is also used for the new logo font at the top of this page. I've tried to keep things simple, one serif body font, one sans serif font for titles, in different weights and colours to create some contrast, while repeating the same letter shapes. I'm moving on from Typography now...

sofobomotypo

I've been learning a bit about typography and layout for SoFoBoMo. There's so much to take in! Over the weekend I read the Non-Designer's Type Book by Robin Williams. The biggest crisis of choice I'm being faced with is the vast variety of fonts I can choose from. I think I'll just have to pick a couple and get on with it. The basics are simple, sans serif for titles and better legibility, serif fonts for larger blocks of text that need to be readable. But there are so many choices! Then there is all the more subtle details; using old-style numbers, kerning, small caps, ligatures, appropriate em dashes and quotes. Adjusting the paragraph and font alignment, hanging punctuation. The way a serif font letter 'a' changes to an enclosed 'a' in the italic version, but the san serif 'a' doesn't change for an italic serif font'a', just slanted. Many of the features that differentiate a layout tool from a word processor. Details that I was never aware of before, but now I see everywhere as I read. This sort of selective revelation has always fascinated me. Growing up I'd never seen a sun dog. Never even knew what one was. It wasn't through lack of opportunity- I spent a lot of time watching clouds float by. A few years ago I read a book about atmosphere and effects. It mentioned sun dogs and I thought they must be some sort of rare, hardly ever seen event. Amazingly, the day after I read the book, I saw one. Then I started seeing them every few weeks. They'd always been there - I just didn't even know to look for them, so I couldn't see them. I think this happens with photography too. Until I was aware enough of sharpening halos and other sharpening side-effects, I couldn't even see them to tell if they were right or wrong. I can look back at early pictures that I thought looked perfectly fine and now see all the issues. I couldn't even see those problems at the time I made them - I wasn't aware. But once you become sensitive to them and aware, then you can start improving on those features. The awareness is the key. The use of rhythm in composition, or layering or other compositional ideas is similar. Before I knew to look for it, I might know an image was more compelling, but couldn't divine why. Once you have the language and awareness to go look for the features, then you can understand what is going on. Only then can you start intentionally using it in your own composition. I now have a much better awareness of typography, that I didn't have before. Hopefully I can apply it to my SoFoBoMo book!

sofobomo : I've never looked at a book before

I only realised this this evening after some time spent looking at a stack of photography books as objects. For the first time I was looking at them as pieces of design, rather than an invisible means to transport the content. Typically I look at what it is in a book, or read the contents of the book. I've never before paid much attention to how that was all put together. Almost all of my photography books have three title pages. The first page is usually blank, typically a binding page of some sort of heavier card, coloured to key off of the rest of the book design. Then there is a plain title page. Just the book's title, set in whatever font is being used to thematically hold the book together. Not usually anything fancy, stark. Lots of empty space. The next page typically repeats the title and adds the photographer's name and other credits. Maybe the author of the included essay is mentioned. Sometimes this page has the copyright and Library of Congress information on the facing page. Other times there might be a blank page. Maybe a dedication. Typically, that dedication gets placed on the next page, again out on its own. Must be important that bit, to get all that space and attention. Then we are off, into the book proper. There might well be an introductory essay, explaining the point of the whole thing you've got in your hands, then the pictures follow. At the end, we might start getting into technical info about the book. Perhaps a colophon provides insight into the typesetting and other design aspects and then we are done. The inside of the cover typically also has some blurb about the purpose of the book in the front flap, which occasionally bleeds over to the rear flap. Otherwise that rear flap is where the biographical information lives. A picture of the photographer. A potted history of the main creator, then in to any other authors, editors or contributers. Beyond that there is typography. What font to use. How to relate them to the content and to each other. How white space is used, what text is combined with the images. Graphic elements within each page. How to number pages. How to title images. Should there be any clues to what's going on or how it was done ? Lots of decisions to make. My only goal is that by the end it shouldn't look as if I did it all in MS Powerpoint, unlike my previous three attempts.

sofobomo layout evolution

Some evolution of the original ideas. Not convinced about the placement of my name on the cover yet. Inspiration struck when I realised that all of the interior pages don't have to be laid out exactly the same way. Something of a D'oh moment, that one.

I also decided to pick a single colour to use for some graphic elements in the page layouts and throughout the book. Fonts still need some attention - they haven't had any yet. Oh and the pictures of course, too! I know these are all the same photos over and over again - I'm trying to keep some of the shots as a surprise, so all the images are just placeholders for now.

Did work out the export settings to form a web PDF of the book and it is looking okay. The spread vs pages options in InDesign export help hold things together in a pdf with two pages per page, or single pages.

post-it design

My first fumbling explorations for SoFoBoMo with InDesign yesterday evening left me with some idea on how to use that tool, but with no idea on what I really want to lay out. I've got a vague grasp of the nuts and bolts of how to put whatever it is together, but no idea on what it is at all. Currently I'm at the scribbling on post-it notes for ideas stage, trying to brainstorm layouts - the one above is a potential cover idea. After a bit of twiddling around in InDesign I produced a first pass at the front cover. The next step I think is to start trawling through photo books in my collection to get ideas and layout pieces for inspiration/ all out theft. I've worked through most of the sizing and export sort of concerns so I know how to get a book together in PDF form and out to blurb. I've also tried a few permutations for the interior page layout. Haven't really got to grips with what all the pages are around the main content and what the front and back pieces of a book should contain or even look like. Then of course there is the issue of writing some content for an introductory essay, to at least set the scene. Oh, and of course, the pictures to take. That whole month is stretching out in front of me! Plenty of time I'm sure. Suggestions for improvement, feedback, modifications and comments are really welcome for these - I'm making it up as I go along right now...

design cues

want contemporary clean modern simple crisp colourful full bleed right justified bold

not black and white edgy funky grunge jarring classic elegant fussy twee framed detailed centered Times

trial balloon: experiences with blurb.com

I've been ruminating on a couple of book ideas; for SoFoBoMo and another in progress and wanted to try out blurb.com as the printer. They seemed like one of the few PoD companies that would do decent photographic prints while also being geared up to at least allow some resale. I have a notion of creating a teaching book that people could purchase and blurb.com might well be a good outlet. I can revise and update the book as I go along, releasing new versions and potentially if there is interest use it as an avenue in to showing a publisher. I've tried other PoD companies, such as lulu.com and was very disappointed in the print quality. I've actually seen blurb.com books in person at trade shows and was reasonably impressed. The booksmart client software that they provide is not terrible. I don't relish the idea of authoring a book with much text in it though - in terms of desktop publishing support it is pretty basic. I think I'll use Adobe InDesign for layouts, then just paste full-bleed pages into blurb for a final print version. However, for this sample, I took a simpler approach. One picture per page, full bleed with a black background for the remainder of the page. I picked a somewhat funky font, made it large and kept things simple. For the book, I picked the cheapest hardback sample that I could put together, 7" square book, with about 15 pages - you could do more pages for the same price - up to 20 for the cheapest book - then you start paying an incremental cost per page. As this was a trial, I thought that would be enough. I selected and edited the images in Lightroom then exported them to Photoshop for a final tweak and colour profiling. The one thing I have heard are lots of horror stories about bad colour from blurb and other PoD companies. I'd found a colour profile for their printer and picked a challenging image for the cover - bright, lime-green with magenta highlights. Perfect. I switched on the soft proof in Photoshop and the defaults looked terrible. Muddy sickly yellow. Anemic colour, flat highlights, muddy shadows. But with a bit of tweaking, some selective colour adjustments to move away from the real lime green to another apparently printable green and some additional contrast, things were looking much better. I went through the same process with all the images, doing some radical adjustments to the original image, just to get it back to close to how I wanted it in the soft proof. That always concerns me, but I thought I'd go along with it.

Assembling the book was straightforward in booksmart. I uploaded the final version after some previewing and bought a copy. Surprisingly, the book shipped only a couple of days later - I'd expected a longer lead time. The book arrived in decent packaging, quickly and without any problems. There I had it, a few days later, a book of my photos! First thing is to notice how fantastic it is to have a hardbacked book of your images. There's a certain thrill to that that is difficult to replicate with online displays or even individual prints, mounted and framed or not. I know all I did was pay some money, there's no real validation involved, but it sure looks good! I've put together a few books for different purposes and the feeling hasn't gone away yet. The second thing to note is that 28 sides (14 pages) isn't very many. You end up with quite a slim volume, particularly in hardback. All cover and no content, if you aren't careful. The slip cover looked great - particularly that green I'd been worried about translated very well, close to how it looked in the soft proof. I'm impressed with how similar it all turned out - throughout the book. On the other hand, I think if I'd uploaded straight, unadjusted sRGB versions of the files I would have been quite disappointed. Some of the original colours just wouldn't have worked out at all. Blurb doesn't make a big deal out of mentioning this - it is there on their site, but they certainly don't push colour management and soft proofing. Something to watch for. The print quality is certainly not as good as I can get from my inkjet (an Epson R800), but is certainly well above acceptable on most of the images. There is a slightly visible cross-hatching in the smoother areas of some images, if you look particularly closely, but from a normal viewing distance all of the images look great. Some of those that were slightly less sharp than others really become more noticeable on the printed page. Also higher ISO black and whites lost a lot of the presence and depth that they have online. They just don't translate too well, the noise becomes more noticeable, the contrast isn't as strong and they just don't have the same amount of life. The one disappointment for SoFoBoMo is that booksmart isn't a simple way to get a PDF of your book. At least, not without a large watermark through each page. using pdf995 I was able to get a final PDF of the book from booksmart, but the layout is not great and the watermark is very visible. Might do in a pinch, though. I also made one rookie mistake, putting something too close to the edge of the slip cover. The cropping is probably about a quarter of an inch tighter than the previews - certainly you are well warned about this but I almost lost an eye from the cover! This particular book has a bar code printed on the rear. From blurb's blog it appears that different printers and different books may or may not end up with this bar code. I've also read that all of the books larger than 7" are printed on a slightly better printer, so the quality should improve even over this quite acceptable start. The binding seems solid, the book feels like a real book. The pages appear to be glued and stitched into a cloth-backed hard cover. It all looks professionally put together, though a bit skinny. A 14 page book cost $22.95 for the 7" hardcover, plus $8 shipping. It is the same price, up to the first 40 sides. Note that blurb refer to pages as each side of one physical piece of paper being one page for the cost calculation. An additional $3 doubles the page count and the book would start to feel more substantial. White space is your friend. Overall I'm happy with the results and plan on using blurb for a final copy of my SoFoBoMo book.

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.