Of all the jobs I’ve done over the years, I thought telling people I was a book designer was pretty straightforward, like saying I was a cab driver or a hair stylist. Everybody would know what that was. Turns out that’s not the case.

Some people say: Oh, you design the book cover.

Sometimes, I respond. But often someone else does the cover and I design the interior layout.

That’s when I see a shimmer of confusion cross their face: what is there to design? I imagine they’re thinking.

We’re all used to opening up our word processing program and starting to type. Someone has already made decisions about the page dimensions, margins, typeface & size, leading, paragraph indents [or not], spaces before or after paragraphs [or not], page numbers, running heads and footers, and a myriad of other design elements. That word-processed document could be printed out and bound, but what you would have is a bound manuscript, not a designed book.

A book designer starts afresh with all those decisions, taking into consideration the book’s purpose, content, intended audience, the various text & graphic elements to be accommodated on the page, their relative importance and relationship to one another, as well as issues related to the final product: how many copies will be printed? by what process? how will it be bound? will it have a full color interior? black & white? some combination of the two? How will it be distributed? How will reorders be handled?

Book design is one of those jobs that, when done well, is pretty much invisible. But when it’s done poorly, it causes the reader irritation, and confusion which usually reflects back on the book’s author.

My APH colleague Linda Coffin of HistoryCrafters gives a compelling example:

“…the design and production of a book are vitally important to the impact that book will have on its readers. There are many compelling, important and well-written stories that go unread simply because they look amateurish or even downright bad. Most people are unaware of how a good design can be a vital communication tool, telling its own story about the narrative and the narrator.

Too often design is treated as just window-dressing (“this isn’t about a pretty design, it’s about the story!”). Of course the story is the the whole purpose of creating the book. But it will be even more effective and more compelling if it’s well-designed and well-produced. The two things simply must go hand-in-hand if we want to do justice to the story.

A recent project is a case in point. My client’s family was unhappy with his narrative, telling him that he hadn’t put enough emotion into it and that it was boring to read. But now I’ve redesigned the layout and given them a sample of the first chapter. The narrative flows in a clearly readable form. The photos are sharp and crisp and sitting next to the text they illustrate. The chapter and topic divisions now make sense. The headers and footers are correct and help guide you through the story. Guess what? Suddenly his family is thrilled. ‘Wow, Dad, this is great stuff,’ said the same son who had complained that there was no emotion in it. Same client, same material, same story, but much better design and production. All the difference in the world.”

And now, as books take on another incarnation as e-books [something I think of as a simply a metaphor, no more a book than a television show is a stage production], even more issues—design and technical—arise. But that’s a post for another day.

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Image by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML under a Creative Commons license

1. Use styles.

Styles have been a feature of Microsoft Word for as long as I can remember. Yet I rarely encounter anyone who uses them. Honestly, they will make your life so much easier! Styles are a set of formatting commands that apply to different types of text in a document—level 1 heading, level 2 heading, body text, bullet text, etc. You apply a style to paragraphs [or characters], then define the formatting elements of the style. [Or vice versa], If you later decide, for example, that your level 1 heading should be Helvetica rather than Garamond, you simply change the style definition and all the paragraphs tagged with that style are changed at once. Styles from Word integrate with styles in InDesign.

2. Use colors to validate styles.

Make things easy on yourself and use color to quickly highlight any problem areas. Once you have set up styles, while you are still in the “construction” phase, apply a color to the style. [It doesn’t need to stay there – this is just part of your quality control process.] Often heading levels have subtle distinctions and it’s not always easy to spot them when they are all in black type. I do this when I get a manuscript and there are multiple heading levels with subtle distinctions. [And because my client doesn’t use styles, they are often inconsistent themselves in how they format the headings.] By tagging Heading 1 blue, Heading 2 green, Heading 3 violet, it’s much easier for my client to look at the manuscript – or just a table of contents extract – and say, no, this one should be heading 2 and that one should be heading 3.

3. Set up a project folder template.

All my book design projects have the same types of elements: text files, image files, layout files, review files, and administrative files. So I have set up a template folder that I can quickly copy and rename for a particular project, ready for me to fill with the particular files associated with that project.

4. Develop a file naming scheme—and use it consistently.

I use a prefix with my client’s initials, project number, project name, and then a suffix with the version number. Version 0 is always the initial design version; the 0 indicates that this is not a file to be carried forward as it often does not have current versions of the text or images.

Regardless of what filenames my clients may have given the image files, I add a prefix so they present in the order in which they will be placed in the book. So my client’s original image [obtained from the U.S. Library of Congress] was named 1s01828u.tif. I added the prefix 006- to indicate it’s the 6th image to be placed in the book. [Because there will be over 100 images, I use leading zeros so they display in order.] As I work through the image enhancement process, I add the suffixes –E [enhanced] and –bw [converted to grayscale]. After enhancing and converting I save it in its ready-to-place .png format. So the new file name is 006-1s01828u-E-bw.png.

5. Use colors to navigate more quickly to the current file.

In the midst of a project it is easy to mistakenly open the wrong file. Use your operating system’s ability to apply color to files and folders so you have a path to follow to make sure you select the current version of the file.

6. Set up headers/footers and slugs.

After two or three rounds of revisions involving two or three or more reviewers, it’s almost inevitable that someone is going to open or print out the wrong file version. Use headers or footers in Word or a slug placed in the gutter in InDesign with text variables that update automatically to show the file name, page number, and latest save date. Emphasize the difference between versions by applying a different color to each new version.

7. Use checklists.

The books I work on usually involved a lot of photos and it’s easy to lose track of which photos are ready to place, which still need work, which are unusable, etc. But with a checklist, I can work through the photos systematically with a minimum of fuss because I can see where I left off and what is yet to be done.

There are many other types of checklists that I use on various projects and there most certainly are checklists I haven’t yet thought about yet.

One of my mantras is “think once, execute many times.” By spending a little time up front to develop systems, procedures, and forms, a lot of the confusion and frustration caused by administrative mix-ups is eliminated and we are free to concentrate on the more interesting and rewarding work we love as book designers.

I’d love to hear about your tips for managing a complex workload. Please leave a note in the comments section.

Examples used are from a recent project with Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, and her upcoming book Finding The
Civil War in Your Family Album.

Book design and production is a complicated process with a lot of moving parts: text and graphics, multiple people, as well as a fair share of technology gremlins. Some glitches are bound to arise, but many are predictable and thus can be avoided—or at least the effect of them ameliorated—by some advanced planning. Here are five common stumbling blocks:

1. Beginning design without a final manuscript

While it’s a good idea to begin thinking about the design of the book at an early stage in the development of a manuscript, changes in the manuscript along the way can blow what seemed to be a great design out of the water.

One of my watchwords is to “design for the extremes.” Here is an example: I had what I thought was a great chapter opening design because all of the chapter headings I had seen were very short – two or three words – so it fit on one line.

When I received the final manuscript, I noticed that chapter titles toward the end were much longer and, wouldn’t fit in the current design. Not only did the chapter title section need to be resized; many other elements on the page had to be recalculated and rebalaced.

This may, in fact, be a better design. My point here, though, is that we had to backtrack and redo steps in the process we thought were complete: using up time and costing money.

2. Waiting until design and layout are complete before selecting a printer/binder

Your printer can provide valuable information that can help you save time and money. And different printers have different capabilities, affecting the page size that can be printed economically. Even among print-on-demand printers such as blurb and lulu, specifications can vary ever so slightly. For example: both blurb and lulu offer a 10×8 landscape format, but lulu does not offer a dustjacket option in the size and format. And, the trim size is slightly different between the two. Not knowing this ahead of time could mean you have to resize your pages.

3. Not having a system for handling physical and digital images

It is very easy to get confused about which photos go where in a manuscript, which ones have been scanned or retouched, which caption and credit goes with which photo, etc. It’s also very easy to misplace digital files unless you establish a clear naming convention and folder system and create a worksheet to keep track of all the images.

4. Not having a clear review and revision process

This is the area that seems to be the most troublesome for personal histories and others involved in producing privately published books. At what point do you show the book to the client? How is it presented? [While online proofing can be expedient as an intermediate step, I believe that final reviews and revisions should be handled on physical paper.] What are they expected to look for and respond to? How many review cycles are included in your initial estimate? And how will you handle excessive review cycles where the client continues to change the manuscript and/or images?

It may seem excessive, but the more specifically you spell out the review steps, responsibilities and deadlines, the smoother things seem to go.

5. Not having a clear sign-off process

Nothing focuses people like having to sign their name on the dotted line. The first thing they want to know is: what am I agreeing to?

Presenting a review copy to your client along with a sign-off form that focuses them on what they should be looking at is a good way to manage the review and revision process and to ensure that nothing is overlooked.

There are a number of places in the book design and production process where a written sign-off is appropriate. Signing off on printing specifications indicates that you are ready to solicit bids from printers. Signing off on the printers proposal indicates the commitment to use that particular printer/binder and specifies how and when payments will be made. Signing off on the page design indicates approval to proceed to page layout. And signing off on the review proof indicates approval to send the files to the printer. There is usually a final sign-off of the printer’s proof as well

In each case, you will want to develop a form that indicates to the client what to look for and what their signature means. The gist of it is that, by signing, the client agrees to proceed to the next step with the understanding that backtracking will likely to incur additional costs and delay the project’s completion.

Some related posts that might be of interest:

what is workflow? and who cares anyway?
Thinking about [profitable] book design & production

As the book design and layout progressed, I created .pdf files as review copies for my colleague. Some of these were printed and trimmed to size for Miriam to see. And before the books were actually printed and bound, the printer sent another review copy to Miriam; this one on the exact paper stock that would be used for the final product.

Finally, the day arrived when the printed and bound books were delivered and a copy was placed in Miriam’s hands.

Until this point, all these review copies were merely electrons dancing on a computer monitor* or stacks of paper.

But the book…ah, the book is an object that exists in the world on its own. It has weight. It has dimension. It has texture and smells of fresh paper and ink [okay, in this case, toner]. It has glue and sizing and sparkling metallic ink embossed on the cover. It makes a sound as Miriam flips the pages.

And just as the transformation of written notes into a school paper makes the content seem so much more profound, coherent and well-reasoned, so too do the words of our manuscript and the photos and captions seem more substantial, of more consequence, when presented in a bound book.

Miriam’s book can take its respected and well-earned place on a shelf, as worthy of that spot as Gandhi’s Autobiography, May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, or Beryl Markum’s West with the Night. [I’m told that, for now at least, Miriam’s book rests on her table, when it is not in her hands.]

Toward the end of Miriam’s book is one of my favorite pictures: Miriam with her great-grandsons Michael and John in the driveway behind the children’s house. [The boys are about 5 and 2 1/2 at the time the picture was taken.] The caption in the book gives the children’s full names, the names of their parents and the street address of their house.

Now, imagine it’s the holiday season of 2085. Someone wandering around the house after dinner pulls Miriam’s book off a shelf where it has been resting snugly between Gandhi and Markum for as long as anyone can remember. She flips through the book and come across the picture of Miriam and the boys. She reads the caption. “Grandpa, look! This is you, isn’t it?” Michael takes the book, looks at the photo, touching it. “John, come here. Remember your green tricycle and how Grandmum would walk us down to the store on the corner to get a cookie?”

And these men, with children and grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren of their own, begin to share memories of their great-grandmother, and their grandparents, and their parents.

Miriam’s book is passed from hand to hand. Fingers trace over the faces in the photos and discussions begin about who looks like whom. Miriam’s stories are read aloud and new stories are told by those now gathered. One of the young children, about the age of Michael when the picture was taken, spills a little gravy on the page. It’s immediately wiped off, but a trace will remain.

And so this book, this lovely and compact time capsule from one century to another, will enjoy a few years of attention again.

And then perhaps it will be placed back on a shelf, or boxed up in the attic, eventually given away to an antique book dealer. And someone may discover it anew, say in 2135. They will open the book and turn the pages, read the text and look at the photos. And they will get a sense of what it was like to be a woman named Miriam, living her particular life in her particular time and place.

Miriam’s book has a life and a destiny of its own—far beyond any Miriam or her children or grandchildren, might have envisioned.

That’s the power of the book-as-object.

*I have no quarrel with e-books; I think they are a fascinating new medium through which to present information via an electronic device. But such a collection of data is no more a book than this blog or the filmography feature on a Netflix DVD.

Other posts that may be of interest:

envisioning seven generations

photos and art and memory and books: this is personal history

the bookness of books

keith smith books

speaking of e-books

I was recently at a screening of The Art of Observation, a documentary on the life and work of Ted Grant, known at the father of Canadian photojournalism.  It was written, co-produced, and co-directed by Heather MacAndrew for Bravo Canada. Mr. Grant and Ms. MacAndrew graciously gave up a beautiful Sunday morning to be with 150 personal historians at the closing session of our annual conference in Victoria, B.C. and answer questions about their work and the film.

The film is rich on many levels, but I feature it here as an example of a beautifully done personal history: artistically presenting the intersection of an individual’s life and career with the powerful historic forces of his time and place. The production values are outstanding. [Yeah, yeah, I know. Most of us do not have the budget of a major national network behind us.] Nonetheless, there is a great deal we can learn by studying the lighting, the voice-overs, the editing. Good creative and technical decisions don’t cost money, but they do require a mastery of the craft.

But even more important than production quality [and I do think that is a very important part of the work we do as professional story tellers] is to see what a strong story Ms. MacAndrew has shaped. Yes, she is telling the story of the man who defined Canadian photojournalism and influenced the profession all over the world. And she is surely aware that this story will become part of an important historical record, catalogued into university and archive center collections. But she is also telling the story of an ordinary man. A son and a husband. A father and a grandfather. A teacher, a citizen, a neighbor.

This is the work we do as personal historians. We draw out and record a person’s life: looking for the distinctive gestures and vocal inflections, the small details, the meaningful objects, the story that wants to be told. And then we present it in the most artful way we can as a gift to the future.

If you are interested in photography, filmmaking, personal history, 20th century history, or Canadian history, I encourage you to get the film. [Lots of great bonus tracks as well.] Watch it more than once. Deconstruct it. Integrate it into your own personal history storytelling, regardless of the medium you work in. And do what you can to get Ted Grant: The Art of Observation into wider distribution.

That may all be true—now. But it won’t be true forever.

Haven’t you thought to yourself: I wish I knew more about my mother’s—or grandfather’s—or great aunt’s life. Or, I wish I had asked my parent/grandparent/other significant person about their life in Tennessee/Russia/the Civil Rights movement/the Ford Factory…whatever they were involved in that probably didn’t register in your consciousness when you were younger.

Now think back beyond these people who you actually know. Did you know your grandparents? Great-grandparents? Great-great grandparents? Wouldn’t you love to know more about what their lives were like?

Books will be here when your kids are done raising their children and begin to want to tell their grandchildren about you. They’ll be here when your grandchildren are beginning families of their own and wonder what it was like for you beginning your family. We tell our stories as much for the generations not yet born as for the ones we are with now.

In the table above I made some broad generalizations: that a generation was 25 years and every generation had children on exactly that schedule. But I wanted to work with easy to compute numbers – you can substitute your own information about your particular family and your own speculations about future generations. But anyway you compute it, seven generations covers something like 150 years.

Working backwards from today, that would put us in 1860. The Civil War has not yet happened. The Drake oil well had just been drilled in Pennsylvania, but oil was not yet a prominent fuel. It would be decades before electricity was commonplace. Don’t you think  stories of that generation’s everyday lives would be of interest today?

]]> http://shoebox-stories.com/2010/10/envisioning-seven-generations/feed/ 4 http://shoebox-stories.com/2010/09/tell-your-life-story-with-20-pictures/ http://shoebox-stories.com/2010/09/tell-your-life-story-with-20-pictures/#comments Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:06:28 +0000 cj-madigan http://shoebox-stories.com/?p=1265 Well, maybe it’s more like a collection of very short stories. My point is, it’s easy to get started. Pull out 20 – or 12 or 37 – photos. [How about 17 for a haiku?] Write down the who-what-where and -when of each one. Then write a little more. Give it some context. What happened just before the picture was taken? What happened afterwards? Who’s not in the frame? What do you remember thinking and feeling then? How do you think about this event now?

Put them together in some way – a scrapbook, a photo album, a print-on-demand book.

I just went through this exercise to make a sample book for a new product I’m offering: a Snapshot Stories™ book. Without a lot of thought, I grabbed 20 photos that happened to be already digitized and accessible on my computer. They range from when I was about three years old to…well, let’s just say, fairly recently. They show my growing up years, my time living abroad and traveling, my immersion in graduate studies and a creative practice. They include family and friends and lovers and colleagues. Without giving much thought to themes or structures, they paint a picture of my life in broad strokes.

If I were to go through this exercise again I might choose 20 different photos. Or I might tell slightly different stories about these photos because each time I revisit the events and people in my life, I see them from a different perspective.

What is important is to start capturing our stories. Stories of what it’s been like to be a particular person, living in a particular time and place. Then getting them into some format that can be passed on to future generations. Wouldn’t you love to come across a book of captioned photos that your great-great-grandmother put together? Or even  someone who is no relation but who lived a hundred years ago in the house where you live now? I imagine people in 2052 or 2087 will be just as intrigued to come across our stories and photos.

We all have stories that only we can tell. Let’s get them down and pass them on.

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a page from my sample book:

This is my favorite photo of myself. It was taken in the British Virgin Islands around 1969/70. We started barboat chartering there with my father [name removed] in the late 60s – he would organize people from his Power Squadron and he invited me and whatever boyfriend I was with at the time, my roommate and her boyfriend, and we’d go for 7-10 days. This picture was taken at the end of the day – I always felt so myself on the boat, on the water. Never more than when we made the blue-water crossing from St. Thomas to St. Croix.

Storytelling Series: “Remember Me” by Lesley Graham from Blurb Books on Vimeo.

Here is a preview of some of the book’s pages:

Did you notice the personal history of the bookmaker Leslie Graham that wraps around the story of her grandfather in the video? Imagine when her grandchildren see the book and the video about the making of the book.

This is personal history. Capturing  stories before they disappear into the darkness of time and loss. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be meticulously researched. It just needs to be done.

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Some related links that might be of interest:

The Association of Personal Historians, a professional organization whose 600+ members help individuals, families, communities and organizations  record and save precious memories and stories in a variety of media.

Other ways of presenting a personal history.

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You go back to the office, look up prices for materials, figure out how much time it will take to build, work up a proposal and return to the potential client and say: This will cost $6,000. The potential client says: Oh, dear. I only wanted to spend $3,000. You say: Oh, okay. I guess I can do it for that price.

This is troublesome on so many levels, the most significant one being: the potential client now thinks you just tried to gouge them for $3,000 more than the job actually costs. Why would they want to do business with such a person? A person who might quite accurately be considered a liar and a thief.

Yet this exchange happens in service businesses on a disturbingly regular basis. Not because the people who cave in on price are dishonest. They are usually the nicest, most generous, most scrupulously honest people you can imagine. But they often are uncertain and insecure about pricing.

Now let’s continue this little dialogue, only now, let’s think of this structure in a more metaphorical way. Assuming you were being realistic about the $6,000 fee, then in order to accommodate the client’s budget, something has to go: about $3,000 worth of materials and/or services, right?

Let’s rewind this scenerio and try another tack. What if, instead, you, the honest builder, said: Well, in the $6,000 fee, each window was $1,000. What if we put in only one. [Yeah, I know, my numbers aren’t realistic, but this is a metaphorical building, remember?] You even do a quick sketch to show the client what the project would look like in order to meet the $3,000 budget. Then the potential client might say: Wow, I really think we need another window. Could you do it with two windows for $4,000? You say: Yes, indeed. We’ll change the specs to two windows and adjust the price to $4,000. Your new client says: Let’s do it. Not only do they trust you, but they feel like you are on their side, helping them to get as close to what they want as possible while respecting their budget constraints.

So what do you think? How do you handle it when you discover that you and your prospective client are miles apart on pricing expectations?

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One reason, I believe, why many people get themselves into this predicament is that they really don’t know how to price their services or answer the question: how much will this cost? If that question strikes terror in your heart or makes you queasy, you might find my Money Matters series of teleclasses helpful.

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This little scenerio I just sketched also assumed that the client was negotiating in good faith. For an edgier take on the issue of haggling over  price, check this out:

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Some related posts that might be of interest:

thinking about [profitable] book design

… I plan to share what I have learned about how to think about a book project, organize its content [particularly images], design and produce it—and make a profit doing so.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the “making a profit” part. Many of us who love doing creative work are not so keen on the numbers side of things. Yet, it is exactly the lack of profitability that forces many of us to give up work that nourishes us and [not be too grandious, but I’m just sayin’] contributes something of value to the world in ways both large and small.

So I personally have committed to learning what I need to learn and doing what I need to do to have a business that is profitable and sustainable and moves me from a position of scrambling for work into one of executing a thoughtful plan that moves me toward more strategic goals.

And, to give credence to that old saying that we teach what we need to learn, I have put together two series of workshops specifically focused on the business side of things.

Money Matters is a series of four one-hour teleclasses that covers: Calculating Your Hourly Rate, Evaluating Pricing Models, Estimating, and Gold Is In the Details. Although I work primarily with private publishers, this series is relevant to anyone who needs to set their own pricing, create estimates and proposals, and manage projects, client expectations, and subcontractors. You can sign up for individual classes or for the entire series at a significant savings.

Print Production Workflow: In Depth is another series of four one-hour teleclasses that explores in more depth the tasks, variables, and trouble-spots you are likely to encounter throughout the seven phases of book design and production. The series is divided into 1] Book Design & Cover Design Workflow, 2] Photos, Memorabilia, and Other Graphic Elements Workflow, 3] Page Layout Workflow, and 4] Printing & Binding Workflow. Like the Money Matters series, you can sign up for individual teleclasses or for the entire series at a significant savings.

Two additional teleclass series are in the works: Design Thinking which will cover Book Design Thinking, Design Fundamentals, Typography Fundamentals, and Partnering with Professionals. Digital Image Workflow goes even further into topics addressed in Print Production Workflow such as DAM [Digital Asset Management] Fundamentals, Scanning Fundamentals, Problem Pictures, and Image Editing Fundamentals.

I’ll be supplementing these teleclasses with blog posts and resources related to these topics, which, I hope, will create a holistic curriculum for setting up, executing, and profitably completing book design projects. Here’s to all of us doing good—and profitable—work in the world.

Some related posts that might be of interest:

My original post on book thinking

and a link to  upcoming teleclasses