Meanwhile, Paul has a good post on the current state of SoFoBoMo, where the buzz is, how you can help. I'm still cogitating on what my topic is going to be. Maybe rediscovering the love affair with my camera might be a good way to go.
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
(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.
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.
SoFoBoMo last year was caught up in trying to understand just what a photographic book classically looked like. I studied books, read about the design process and tried to emulate all the best practices of a print book that I could find to copy. I borrowed as many big, expensive, heavy photographic books as I could get from the library. I poured over the books in my collection, not looking at the photography for a change, but looking at the construction and commonalities that made them a photographic book. All of this understanding was used to create a PDF. An electronic book. A simulacrum of a real book.
This year I'm beginning to question that approach. It may well be the right process to follow if you see SoFoBoMo as a step towards printing a physical book. Then you be right to view the PDF as a lesser version of the final goal. Something that you can share online to give people an idea of what the real end result might have looked like.
However, this time around I'm thinking about a different tack. One where the PDF is the actually desirable end goal, not just a compromise required to prove to the rest of the online world that the SoFoBoMo challenge was completed. Not a second class citizen, but a better option altogether.
This is in part inspired by Brooks Jensen's writing and podcasts on the utility of PDF. Brooks and I exchanged some email on his slight disappointment in the displays of books from last year that used Issuu. His disappointment stemmed from the removal or restriction of many of the best features of the PDF format (e.g., full screen views, full control, higher resolution, zoomable), by the use of an embedded flash-based viewer. At the time I was a bit uneasy about the features such as the animated page turning, that tries to mimic a real magazine or book. It seemed very gimmicky and a mistake to be using this new technology to emulate the older realization. Many of us used Issuu last year because of a lack of hosting options. This year SoFoBoMo will hopefully be able to host the PDFs directly, removing one level of indirection between the PDF and the potential audience, which should be an improvement. I'm beginning to think there are more interesting things that can be done with PDF than just trying to copy how a book looks.
Many of these thoughts crystalized in my mind today while watching Scott McCloud giving an overview of "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art" in the TED talk, below. Take the 17 minutes to watch it. I'll wait. The good stuff starts about 7 minutes in though the whole thing is enjoyable.
Scott is obviously talking about comics and comic books. But comics are just another form of picture book, in many ways similar to a photographic book. Photography too is obviously a visual medium that tries to channel all of the senses through vision. Photographic books might seem like the highest form of displaying photographs, along perhaps with a gallery show. These are probably the two goals most photographers strive towards. A book and exhibition. But perhaps the PDF can be something more, something different. Books represent many compromises for photographs, the number, the size, how they relate to other images. Maybe we are making the same McLuhanesque mistake of trying to emulate physical photographic books in PDF form, rather than embracing the opportunities presented by the new medium. My first thought would be to add audio and hypertext, but from the content of Scott's talk, I wonder now if that might be a false path. Just like pop-up books aren't a big success as photographic books, I'm not really thinking about an interactive solution. Mostly I'm wanting to consider different layout choices that aren't constrained by the 2 sides of a sheet of paper, assembled to be read left to right. So then what is the durable mutation of the photographic book? What should it look like? How should we interact with it? What happens when you consider the screen as a window instead of a page?
If we can understand what the compromises are for a physical photographic book, then we consider how those change in the digital realm. If you find out how you can break free from those constraints then SoFoBoMo might be the perfect opportunity to see where things might go. It doesn't have to be a physical book rendered digitally, one fake virtual page turn at a time. The thing to consider is what might be the best mutation for the photographic book.
We are currently constrained by the screen size, and the resolution and the bandwidth available. But PDFs present exciting opportunities to explore what a book might be if it wasn't restricted to the physical realities of the printed page. SoFoBoMo is a great opportunity to collectively and individually explore what a digital book could be all about. Last year I said 'So give it a go. Sign up and pledge to take part in SoFoBoMo. Make a book.' This year maybe I'll try to urge some of you to give it a go. Make a durable mutation. What do you think? Are you really more interested in making a book and SoFoBoMo just gets you part of the way there? Or do you think there are more interesting things to do with the PDF?
A thought-provoking podcast from Brooks Jensen on PDFs, over at Lenswork. Brooks pitches the PDF as the next big thing for publishing and the medium where photographers who are interested in working on the cutting edge should be publishing their work. I've heard Brooks talk about PDFs in the past as a great means for publishing but he seems to be going further this time. I assume that's the experiences he's gained with the Lenswork Extended product. Typically photographers think about the published, physical book as the ultimate end goal, but here the PDF is put forward as a better option, particularly as a means of distribution. I've produced a few PDFs and it is a good experience to go through, making the selections, doing the layout and editing. It does always feel home-made - without that stamp of authority that a publisher, other than yourself, gives to work.
But here the argument is made that the PDF is worthwhile goal in of itself, which certainly matches well with the goal of SoFoBoMo. Even there, the PDF decision often can feel like a forced compromise - we'd all really like to have it be a 'real' book, not an electronic file. But perhaps the PDF can be thought of as a higher goal than a printed book. More opportunity try new things. Perhaps even mix in audio with the images. Also, thinking on last year, I was able to see over 50 photographic books, that I'd never be able to see if I had to buy them - because of the cost, and the physical space required to store them. PDF certainly enables more people to see the work. Given how few of my pictures see print, PDF probably makes even more sense. There is the downside that the resolution of a PDF isn't currently as good as physical book. Also you've got the issues of controlling the viewing environment - you have no idea what sort of screen or calibration is being used to look at the end product.
At the same time, photography always feels like a successive series of disappointments, or reduction in quality. The images in your head aren't often as good as the image on the back of the camera. Those small images on the back of the camera often don't live up to the full size version on a screen. Once it's been processed, the prints are always one step removed from how it looked on a screen. Each stage reduces the quality of the image, real or imagined. PDF removes one of those levels of transformations. Maybe it can even be a truer representation of the image than a print, if we can sort out these resolution and calibration quandaries.
So what do you think? Is a PDF a good end in itself, or just something to settle for when you can't make a real book?
Trying to think through the things that worked well for me when doing SoFoBoMo and the things that I struggled with or would do differently if I was doing it again. Paul Lester has already provided some of his thoughts on this topic, too.
Don't over think this bit. It doesn't have to be the most overarching, complex project theme. In fact, the simplest idea is often the best to work with. Great ideas come from putting two small ideas together in an interesting way, so don't worry about it being too deep and meaningful. The real key is to make it something that is accessible to you. Maybe you'll shoot your entire project in a day, in which case, accessibility isn't too challenging, if you happen to be near the subject or theme. But if you want to return to it for a few times over the month, don't pick something that is far away or difficult for you to get to. It just adds one more barrier to getting it done. The best subjects and projects are those close to home that you are familiar with and have access to. Don't pick the American Southwest as your theme if you live in England and won't be there during the SoFoBoMo month. Some of the best books I saw last year had the simplest themes, for example, the numbers 1 to 35 in 'I can count' by ndalum78. A treasure hunt, a witty book, all in one simple and elegant project - all from a very simple idea.
At the same time you aren't over thinking the project selection, it is worth giving it some thought. Pick something you want to do or that interests you. You will be looking at the pictures a lot, so find something that fires your imagination and has enough depth for you to shoot 35 pictures of.
I'm not a graphic designer. I'm not a book designer. You don't have to be. I do have quite a few photographic books at home. I looked at them, with an eye to how they were laid out. Take some time to study the books you have available to you. Go to your library and look for some more. Instead of looking at the pictures too closely, pay attention to the structure and flow of the book design. Notice how almost all books you look at have two title pages, one very plain and readable, the other more stylised? After a bit of time spent looking at the structure you'll get a feel for the patterns you'll want to replicate in your book. It is also worth reading some introductory books on graphic design and typography. You don't need to be an expert but it helps to have some appreciation of what is going on.
If you plan on doing a layout of your own, find a book with the sort of structure and design you want and copy it. Make it your own, borrow hints from it, rather than going all out to design it yourself.
There is plenty of software that will let you lay out the pages. I used Adobe InDesign to lay out my pages, which has a big learning curve. There are easier options. The key is to spend a bit of time before the SoFoBoMo period getting all the kinks worked out. Make a sample book just to work out how to get from the start to the end PDF or printed book. It'll help you a lot to do this without the deadline pressure. I made a small book with Blurb the month before SoFoBoMo that really helped me understand how I wanted things to look. Use pictures you have already, or go shoot some in an afternoon. It will help.
Some people used PowerPoint. Microsoft Word. Microsoft Works. Most anything you can use to put images and text together and then print from, can be used to create a PDF book. If you have a Mac, the PDF printing is already built in. Most Adobe products on either platform will generate a PDF. If you have a Windows machine, there are several free PDF printer drivers you can install - then all you have to do is print to them and your PDF will be created. e.g., Foxit PDF Creator or pdf995
You probably don't need to go and buy new software to create a SoFoBoMo PDF. If you want to go to a finished book, things get a bit different. Shutterfly and Blurb both provide layout software for creating books. However, this software doesn't typically let you produce a PDF, without heavy watermarks or branding, so isn't ideal for a SoFoBoMo submission. I did my book in layout software and generated full page JPEGs for each page. I then used the Blurb software to put each of those pages as 'full bleed' (print to the edges) images. So I had the same layout without really using the Blurb layout software, other than to assemble the pre-designed pages.
