Book Design 101: A Step-by-Step Graphic Design Guide for Turning Your Content Into a Book

1. Introduction: Work design a book. Easy, right? Just tons of material gradually and decisions, high-stakes, deadlines, printing costs, easy. What could go wrong? Whether you're designing a book for a client or you're just creating a book for yourself that turns into a beautiful keeps sake. I'm here to take you through the daunting Bramble of decisions and help you tame them into a clear and understandable path that just lets you take it one step at a time so that by the end you'll have a beautiful book. I'm Stefan book, her book designer. I've been designing books for over 20 years for clients such as Saks, Fifth Avenue, Chronicle Books, David Hockney, Philip Glass, tar sands, sing. I've also published some books, a whale. In this class, I'll take you through the entire book design process. From first gathering and shaping the content. They're doing the layouts, figuring out the specification of your book for the free press project, all the way through printing in binary. The point where you hold a finished book in your heads. In fact, the only thing that I won't teach you this software because it's a tool in the tools change. And to me that's the least interesting part of once an otherwise really fascinating during the project for this class, make a book about a person or an event that's important to you. And we'll go through the process together to break down a complex challenge into manageable steps. This class is for anyone who wants to make a book, whether you're just starting out or you're a seasoned professional who's just getting into book design for the first time. Either way, what you learned in this class will work for book projects. But it'll really also teach you how to run any larger design job. My goal is to help you avoid some of the potholes and trapdoors that I've encountered so that you can make new and interesting mistakes that we can all learn from. These are complex projects and there's always so much to cover. I've tried to cram as much into this class as I possibly could, if there's something that interests you or that you're curious about, please ask, and I will answer to the very best of my ability. And I am so eager to have these conversations. So you'll be doing me a favor to I. Thank you so much for going on this journey with me and for investing your care in this process. For caring about flux. Here we go 2. Class Project: So as we've talked about the project for this class, is to design a book about a person or an event that's important to you. And the reason that's the assignment is just so that you don't have to do a lot of research because this is about book design and research is a wonderful way of going down rabbit holes and it's a great way of procrastinating without really feeling you're procrastinating. So that's why I want you to pick something as a subject that you're really familiar with. A complete this project, you're going to need a few things. You'll need a notepad or sketchbook. However you'd like to make notation. You're going to need a computer and you're going to need some basic layout and image editing software. I'm going to use InDesign and Photoshop. But you can use really whatever you like as long as he can lay out a multi-page document and you can do some editing work on images. It would be helpful to have a scanner, but it's not strictly necessary. It would be really good if you had a way of getting images from the real-world into the computer. There is a class workbook waiting for you in the resource section. And that's so you can track your progress and you can make some additional notes. You can complete this project in any number of ways. The media successful book is one that teaches me something about the subject that I didn't already know. A book that conveys the feeling of engaging with the subject. My book is about kittens. So for me the goal is humble. It is just there to remind me what it's like to have crazy Rascal a kittens around that to me, is a successful book. Successful book project is getting to that result without it taking months and months or sometimes years. That's what I'll be teaching you. And it's also what I'll be sharing and commenting on in the project gallery. At this point, you may already have a project in mind. Excellent. I'll help you shape that content if you're taking this class because you're sort of generally interested in book design. Let's find you a topic. So you can try out these lessons, but pick a subject that's close to something where you already know a lot, where you're the expert so that you have a ton of material at hand. If you need to write something you are writing as an expert. If you're gathering images, you don't have to look far because you've taken a logic, saved a lot. If you really want to research a new topic. I would keep the research pretty simple. Because again, from my own experience, it's very easy to go down a rabbit hole. As I was looking at projects that I could do as a demo for this class. I found a whole interesting area of the world about World War One Bank pipers. And I put feel comforting tendrils of new trivia. Reaching for me and pulling me down into the vortex of non productivity. I would steer clear of that. Something you know, something you're comfortable with. Let's get started with framing your book top 3. What Even Is Your Book?: The first step of the process may seem obvious, but it's really easy to forget. That step is, what is this book about? And sometimes it's obvious, my book, kittens, but sometimes it just seems obvious. You may have gone down the bagpipe, our route. Spike my sincere warnings. And you may say, Stefan, Don't be an idiot. This is a book about World War One bag pipers. Then I would come back to you and say, well, is it about the way the bagpipes were made? Is it about the uniforms of the bag pipers? Is it about stories of individual bag pipers? Is it in fact, a book about overcoming adversity under heretofore, unimaginable horrors. These are questions you have to ask yourself. If you can get that clear and if you can take a few minutes at the beginning of the process to jot down a few notes about what the point of this is. It will really make your book a lot better me, because I like to set myself an easy challenge. I pick the kittens. So what is the point of my book? Kittens are fun. My kittens were amazing. And my kittens were wonderful company at a time when I really, really need it. That's all. The point of my book, is just to create a memento of that time with me 33 days. And I wanted to commemorate that. The audience of this book, just me, probably my mom, maybe some friends that gave me advice along the way. Probably really just mean you because I'll share it with you. But that's the second thing. Who is the audience for your book? And don't just think about it. Really. Take the step of writing it down. Put it in your sketchbook, put it in a post-it note on your desktop, something like that. Somewhere where you can refer back to it. Because as we get into the process, it's easy to just go along and go with the flow of the material. And in a lot of ways that's good, but it's nice to have the corrective and to have a sort of conceptual anchor to return to. Here are some questions you can ask yourself. Who is this book about? What is the feeling I want readers to have? What is the feeling I want readers to have? Engaging with the book? What do I want them to learn about my subject? What do I want them to feel about the subject? Maybe another important question to ask yourself is, what is the tone of the book? Is it a funny book? Is it supposed to be a gripping adventure? Is it a heart-wrenching tail? Is it supposed to be nostalgic? Is it supposed to be heartwarming? And it's not so much a matter of then hitting that goal exactly, but it's helpful to have it in the back of your mind as you're going through the image selection process, the writing process, and how you structure the layout to have in mind what the emotional impact is supposed to be in. Again, what the tone is. If you haven't answered these questions for yourself, pause the video now and just spend a few minutes. Write down something. Once you've answered these questions, I want you to make a little mind-map. Just write down the first few things that come to your mind, what it's about. And then those are your main islands. And then you branch off and write down a few things that come to mind for each of those main points. That can be about color, it can be about mood, it can be about information you want to cover. Let your mind really roll. Put that down into the mind-map and then see if there are themes that are emerging that seemed the most important or interesting or engaging to you. Then what I would like you to do is try to distill that into one or two sentences that describe your book. For example. This is a book about the heroism and camaraderie of World War One, bag pipers. Based around the story of one particular bagpipe. I'll give you a demonstration for the book I'll be working on about my foster kittens, marble and Floyd. They were the first foster kittens that I took in from the Pasadena Humane Society. And it was this huge, amazing experience for me to have these kittens here. And they were super intense and adorable as you can see. So I want to create a book that keeps that memory fresh in my mind. Because it's easy for those things to happen and then get overwritten by more life happening after. So I want to have a nice memory of them. So right now, you can see my mind-map on the screen. Really simple, really direct effect to sum up my book in one sentence, it would be, it's a time capsule of the first time. I got to foster kittens. Maybe that's too surface. Maybe the line is really, this book is a time machine that lets me re-experience the joy of having these two little kittens in my home. Another thing that's important at this point in the process is to make a preliminary determination of how you're going to publish your book. Everything we do here can change at anytime in the process. It's non-linear, so it's like a painting. You may work on something over here and then you go back over here. If you do something here, it may change something you want to do here. But this is what I'm saying. Preliminary. Have some thought as to how you're going to get this produced. If you're going through a publisher, it's going to be different from publishing through a service like blurb. Or whether you're going to make your own printouts and have them bound or buying them yourself. All of that affects how you're going to set up your documents and how you're going to set up your formatting. So give that a little bit of thought. And again, make a note in the class resource document or in your sketch book, or however you like, just so that this can kind of percolate in the back of your head a little bit. So now it's your turn. Make a little mind map. Figure out who your audience is, how you're going to publish the book and write all that down as simply as quickly as you can. Everything, as I said, can change as we go through it. You can change your mind that anything. But it's good to have a starting point and it's good to have it for me on a piece of paper. So you can refer back to it easily. You don't have to dig for a document. It's like, Oh God, I wrote it to myself somewhere Where is it? Have it somewhere where it's present for you and where it's easy to scratch something out or to add a note. Do that. And then maybe in the next class 4. Defining Your Audience: Now that we've landed on a subject and we've started refining it a little bit. I bet that a lot of ideas already forming in your head. That's going to happen to all throughout the process. So make sure that whenever any little idea comes into your head, write it down in your sketch book, put it on your notepad. I've heard people say that the measure of a good idea is that you're remembering, that if you can remember, it must not have been that good of an idea. This is false. You will absolutely also forget good ideas. You will forget things, write them down, especially when the ideas are coming fast and furious. They're good ideas will go out of your head, the bad ideas will go out of your head. And by the unmoving like I had all these great ideas, what happened? Write things down. One of the things that I want you to focus on right now, beyond the ideas that are just coming in as they come, is to really focus in on who your audiences. Because it's so easy to think that your audience is the same as you, that they'll automatically care about the same things you care about and that you don't have to convince them, or that you don't have to explain certain things because to you it's very, very clear. So I want you to spend a few minutes to write down and describe who your audience is. And I know there's going to be a temptation to say, well the audience is everybody because everybody is going to think this is the greatest. I go through that stage. Everybody goes through that stage. Try to really be precise. Is it a particular age group? Is it a group that has a particular affinity? Classical music fans, as we're talking about concerts or bagpipe aficionados to stay with the same. Where do they live? Are they receptive to a lot of language? Are they more image oriented? Are they swayed by Schumer? Are they more interested in serious content? Are they perhaps interested in appearance series, which is a very different state. There are people that will not pick up a book that's pink because it feels threatening to their identity. There are people who want big books that they can display around their home to show that they are people who have big books around their home. The important thing is to really get a feel and a clear picture of who you're designing this book for. Because in most cases, it's not just people that are exactly like you. And it's really helpful to consider who is going to be in your audience that will determine a lot of your choices. So spend a few minutes, write it down, try to be as precise, as descriptive as possible in a way that's meaningful to you. This is a class project. So you're not doing this to convince a publisher to say, oh, well here is the data of what these people are doing. It's not at this point for this project and marketing tool or a sales tool to convince somebody the intention is for you to have one more way of guiding you through the decision process of making a book. But as you go through the process, you may find that your perception of the audience will change. That happens all the time. The material, a lot of times will tell you what the book wants to be and who the book is. Four, of course, if you're working with a client, and if you're working with a publisher, they will tell you exactly what the book was for and who it needs to be for, for the project to be successful for their needs. That case, that work is done for you. But as we're doing it as a cause project, you have the liberty of defining that. So now that we've done that, it's time to start tackling the content 5. Gathering Content: It's time to start tackling the content. For me, it's very easy because it's just all kitten photo. So I've created a folder on my computer that's photos of marble and Floyd, lots and lots of Kip and photos. I took a ton of videos. So I went through those my favorite moments and took screenshots. And we're gonna get into this a little bit later. But I've picked a 7-by-7 format because I'm going to print with Blurb. And that's their smallest format. The reason I pick the smallest format is a kittens are small. And so books wall. But also because of dealing with these screenshots, the resolution isn't super great. And using a smaller format allows me to use a lot of images that otherwise wouldn't be usable in a 12 by 12 book, for example, are usually set up a main folder for the project. And then I have a few sub-folders that makes sense to me. Like images, text, maybe scans if I have a lot of flat documents relative to photos, maybe there are graphs, things of that nature. I like to not get overly granular with folder structure, which I've also seen, then that defeats the purpose because the point of it is just to set up a structure where you can find things very easily. To that end. I also will put the project name in the name of the main folder and then in the name of every sub folder, and usually some sort of abbreviation for each document file. So that if I quickly have to search for something, I can just put that in the search bar. It's something useful we'll cover. In my case, I've already gathered all the images. I just took them off like camera. I grabbed them out of the photos app and drag them into this folder. I'll marble and Floyd images. I'm probably going to write a little bit of text. That's probably going to come as I go through the process of editing and memories come to me. For right now, I'm leaving all the image names on touched because it's all kittens. It's all from a very short amount of time, from a short time span with jobs where I'm pulling in images that span years or that span a lot of different photographers or locations. I usually take the step of going through and renaming the images, something descriptive. The point is always to make your material as easily useful to you as possible. For this project, I've asked you to pick something that's near and dear to you. So your images are most likely going to be your own or family images and your texts, maybe something that you've read nor that's something by a friend or something that you have direct access to. In a client's situation, you may be asked to gather material from far field. You may be working with researchers who may be working with anthropologists as I sometimes do. You may be asked to generate imagery, either yourself or with a photographer or you may be asked to illustrate something. And that's all great. Makes sure that that's reflected in your contract. Make sure that that's described in your scope of work. Maybe it's parceled out from the main book design job because that's also something that can expand over time a great deal. It's very important as you gather images that you have good resolution, that you have rights. This is a, this is a big one that people tend to forget, is that you are clear to use images and text. For example, if you use song, lyrics and your book, and it's a book that sold, you have to get clearance to use those images because there was to use those lyrics because there is a publisher for that sort of thing. If somebody else's gathering materials for you, make them a little checklist of what you need. Because otherwise you'll get a lot of small images. You'll get images that they just grabbed off of Google images that are usable because they're not legally free and clear. Or they're teeny tiny little postage stamp size images. Make sure that everybody on the project knows what you need to use material successfully. In the book. Part of the licensing conversation is also typeface, don't pirate typeface. Okay, so the first thing we have to do is get a handle on what materials we have. For me. We'll talk about chickens. It's gonna be a lot of Kip and photos. I already have them all gathered in my marble and Floyd folder. All Brian, just like that. Now, I could theoretically go through here and just sort of mark or delete or movies around. For me, that's not the most efficient way. I have a contact sheet generator that I bought that lets me create an InDesign contact sheet through bridge. But you don't have to necessarily do that. You can do it by hand. You can drag these all totally InDesign document. As a matter of fact, let me show you that real quick. Here. Doesn't have to be anything special. I just make it eight now I live in document, just something that works on my office printer. So size images. Let me go to book. You know, theoretically I could just go through and grab any number of images. Let's just grab, let's grab these piccolos. And then as I drag and click box, I can make a grid with the arrow keys. And that's a quick and easy way to have a little contact sheet. I'd probably make things bigger just because it's easier to see. But that's an easy way of doing it. I have a little program that does it for me. So that's the process I'm going to go through real quick. Let's go into Adobe Bridge. Religious order by name or by name, or by day created uncle by name. Let's see, right. Yeah. Okay. So that I go to my tools, Grandin's on contact sheet. Page setup like landscape just because it fits the screen better than I like a grid that's four columns, three rows. So that I can get this all condense onto searching pages 0, K. There was honored ways of doing that. The idea behind it is to have all your images to look at so that you can edit what you want to include in the bulk. And if inform me, of course it's only photos, but it could also be scans of things. You've done, scans of drawings for bits of text. If you're doing a book that's mostly text, obviously this is a step you can skip and you could just put the text right in. But I'm going off the idea that for this assignment you're doing, you're generating the content for this as you go along and then it's going to be a variety of things. And so having some sort of overview is super helpful. Alright, so here we go. So now I have my contact sheet. Then you can see here in the pagers preview that I have 13 nice and neat pages. Now begins the work of going in and saying what images, what images do I not want? Then for me, that process is what images tell a story. The easiest thing for a first selection. Well, there's this much stuff that's fairly similar, is to get rid of duplicates or near duplicates. So these two right here are pretty much the same. So I'm going to choose the one that has a little bit more background area available, which is this one. Not this one. This one really a slightly different angle. And on this one you can see the tin foil that I've put on doors and wood because of kittens with Scratch that up. So maybe I'll actually leave that this has more area which I like. But this tells a little bit more of the story, makes me remember more things. So that was good. These two are very similar, but Floyd vanishes here a little bit and has a much more dynamic pause here. So this is what's going to happen now, is I'm just going through and I'm gonna get rid of things, right, kind of immediately go. Not sure. This doesn't really do much for me visually. These two are pretty much the same. But here, the string of the cat toy goes directly through the model's face. And I think that's pretty cool. So that one's going away. I'm gonna be doing this now for hours and hours and hours. We're going to cut to a point where I've made my selection. There we get into moving things into the document. For now. What's your files and yonder folders? Make sure everything is nice and organized. And then meet me in the next class. 6. Choosing Size & Paper: Okay, we know what the book is about. We've defined our audience, we've gathered the materials. Now it's time to start making the book. And this is where things get dicey because this is usually where the procrastination starts, where there's mental hurdles, where you go, Oh, no, I'm designing a book, what to do? So we're going to design a book, but we're not going to design a book right now. Let's just start slow and easy. All we're going to do, what to pick a size. What I like to do in those situations is thought about where I want. I'm gonna just go to my bookshelf. I go, you know, what sizes do I liked this kind of size? Do I like this sort of size? Do I want, maybe I want a soft cover. Hardcover. Maybe it's a really, really small book like this pocket perimeter of parliamentary procedure. Have some fun and just start. Maybe it's, maybe it's this tiniest of books that I still have from when I was a kid. I've always wanted to make one like that, but it turns out they're really, really expensive to make unless you make a gazillion of them. Go figure, go to your bookshelf and lay out a few books that feel comfortable to you in terms of size. Then. One. As I say, in every segment, you can always change your mind later. The important thing is to pick something that lets you proceed to the next step. From my book. The kittens have a little bit constrained because I'm going to produce it through blur because I just want one or two copies. So I just go through their menu. I'll go Okay, well, what signs do they have? And then I find books that are roughly that size or exactly that size. So this would be exactly the size that I'll be doing my book out. So that's quite nice and petite. Another choice you can make is the choice between coded and uncoded stock. Uncoated stock tends to feel a little bit nicer under the hand. You sacrifice a little bit in the vibrancy of your colors and sometimes a little bit in the definition of your images a little bit. The papers have gotten very good. Paper is called code it because it's coded in clay. Clay is baked into the paper and polished and that's what makes it so smooth. And what happens is that the ink sits on top of that clay layer. And so it's, stays very vibrant. These very sharp because there's very little spread to the ink. But an uncoated sheet, you put the color on and because it's a porous surface, the ink gets drawn more into the paper and it spreads a little bit, and that's called spread. So there's a little bit of a sacrifice in the tail and a little bit of sacrifice with vibrancy. And especially when you're dealing with images that have a lot of dark shadows. What happens on uncoated stock is that the blacks end up being a little bit muted. So the black ink ends up looking more like 80 or 90% gray. And sometimes that's okay and you can counteract it a little bit by making it a four color black. What I like to do is I like to use 20% cyan, 20% of Agenda, 20% yellow and then 100% black. And that makes it what's called a rich black. But even with that, an uncoated stock, It's going to dull a little bit. So if you really want something that pops in terms of color, and Christmas, coated paper tends to be your best bet. The middle way that I usually pick what I do art catalogs is that I use coded sheets that are matte or at best silk. Because there are, you can get high gloss paper that can be really great if you're doing fashion or if you're doing something where that's conceptually appropriate, unless you're using a heavier weight or the coated sheet. To my eye, it tends to look a little bit tacky, especially when it's thinner. If it doesn't just fit the concept perfectly, if you have something super poppy than it can work. Also, if you're using metallic inks, this show up a tiny little bit on uncoated stock. But really, you're wasting your money. Fluorescent inks sometimes can look really super nice on uncoated sheets, but with fluorescent colors, you can go either way. They look really good, either way, they tend to fade over time of their grade. With both sheets, you can do embossing, you can do dicots, you can do all sorts of things. That comes down to wait more than anything. One thing I've learned, if you ever get the chance to print with phosphorescent ink, with glow in the dark ink, you'd think that it would work better with uncoated stock because it sits on top, but in fact it works orders of magnitude better uncoated because more ink soaks into the paper. And the glow in the dark effect really comes from having a lot of ink present in the piece. Now that you've picked your size, it's time to set up, basically outfile. Again, we're not designing a book when I'm deciding a whole book. Not to worry, no fear. Pick the size. Cool, cool, cool. Then now we're just going to make a document that reflects that size. So for me, when I set up a seven by seven document facing pages, I'm going to use InDesign. You can use any program that makes you uncomfortable. You just set that up. And that's going to be, you know, maybe that's today's work. Maybe look that you have the right color mode. Check with your printer. It used to be that anything for print would have to be set up in CMYK. But these days, a lot of printers actually prefer that you set up the file and RGB. So if you're working with a printer, asked them what they prefer. If you're working with a print on demand service, check what their spec site they'll have. They'll have an FAQ file that takes you through what's necessary or they'll have a spec page, make sure that you set it up to that. If there is a color space that's specified, that at a very basic level, make sure you have your signs correct. Make sure you have the right amount of bleed. Make sure you set your safeties correctly. And the safety just being the area of the page where you don't want to put anything that might be trimmed off because this is an industrial process and things are going to shift a little bit to the left from the right and the top and the bottom. And when you put things right at the edge, you're just flirting with disaster. So there's a safety area and the printer will give you that. You don't put anything there. Page numbers. This is a very common error that I see in student portfolios is people put things right at the edge because it's sometimes it can look cool. But when you're looking at it professionally, you immediately go, oh, here's somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. So don't be that person. We already touched on this a little bit During the content management phase. But if you haven't edited your images yet, or if you haven't selected your images yet. This is, again a good time to set up a contact sheet. I prefer a contact sheet that's editable where I can just grab placed images and put them into my final document, which just makes things so much faster. And I'm going to produce this using Blurb. And that means I have to use their specifications. I'm going to do a 7-by-7 book. And if you go to their site, the specifications are 6.75, 1625 quarter-inch bleed all around. The margins they want is top, bottom an outside edge or 0.7 points or 8.25 for the inside half inch bleed. I'm going to start with 20 pages, but let's save that book. And I always like to put a round number on it. So this is problem number one, so that I can save things. As we go along. Then what I like to do quickly put in a little bit of massing. Want to know what's wear off title page. The title page. This is going to be introduction. We'll make this page just kinda sign that color for now. It's not gonna be that actually while we're setting that up. Let me saying I'd like to do that helps me with these projects. And that is to set up a layer. I'm going to call this the four layer. We're going to put their master page. I'm going to just put in a fake, a little shadow for the fold because it helps me keep in mind. There is a page fault because I see it a lot where people will design for the full spread. And then things get lost in the gutter because people just didn't take it into it. Sum up, your task right now, simply don't be freaked out. Peace. Come over to your bookshelf and pick sizes that you'd like, lay them out, and then hopefully it won't, it'll jump out at you and go, Oh, this is going to be the size of the book that I'm making. And then start setting up your document. 7. Designing Text: Now, when you're ready, start flowing your type into the document to the degree that you do well. And obviously I was very little, but I wrote a little bit. So I'll flow that in now. Then. Let's pick a font. This is fun. Make sure it's fonts that you have a license to use. Let's start playing around. You know, take some pages and maybe duplicate them and just try different type faces and see what you like. If you're dealing with huge amounts of text and you're not familiar with Lincoln textboxes. I'd say pause this lesson and find a tutorial on linked text boxes. Because otherwise that becomes a nightmare to deal with. Especially if you're dealing with an author who isn't you. And you need to make edits much, much better to have everything linked so that you don't run into problems of having to take the bottom of one text box and paste it to top of the next word. You want to link those textboxes. Find a tutorial for that if you don't know how that's done. And then come back here as you're picking your typefaces. Again, this is a good time to look back to your mood board. See if there are things that you wanted to use. Tryout if they actually work? Sometimes they do, sometimes I don't see no change your plans accordingly. I'll give you a few rules of thumb for picking typefaces. For large amounts of texts. I like to pick slightly more conservative typefaces. For my book. I'm picking Franca, which is a hybrid of Franklin Gothic and Helvetica, because it's a beautifully constructed typeface that has great carding pair. So all the letter distances are really nicely set up out of the box so I don't have to fix anything. It's really legible. I don't have a ton of texts. If I had, for example, a textbook where I was setting a novel, I would probably use a serif typeface over a sensor of typeface. I think they both legible, but I think we're more accustomed to reading large amounts of texts in serif type. And it looks a little bit warmer and friendlier to me. But that's up to you. That's your choice. I like to use a lot of letting, that, letting being the space between the lines of time because it's easier for the eye. And it also looks modern to me. It makes everything feel a little bit more premium. When everything gets squished together. It ends up looking very much like a textbook. And it looks very dense and unapproachable. I don't love that. For headlines and subheads. That's where my mind. You put the style. But again, refer to your moodboard, referred to the idea of who your audience is. And let that guide you. How much style do you worked? You want a cool, sort of slightly understated hat? Or do you want a fascinating, I like a big hat with a veil and a giant feather that you'd wear to the races and ask God or possibly to a Prince concert in 1984? The answer is gonna be different based on what your subject is, who you are, nuts. This is sort of where your voice comes into it as well. Is it color, is black and white? Which was also a bit of a production question. Is the interior of your book all one color or two colors as a four-color. For most printing these days, everything is set up for four colors, so you have a little bit of leeway. Even though side note, I would usually set up my body copy the main part of the main body of the text. In black, only just 100% black without any colors mixed in. Because it makes the type sharper in case the registration goes off a little bit. Because you have nothing to register to your chest have the black ink. Whereas if you do for color black, you use very small type and the plates go a tiny bit out. Can happen. The type starts looking fuzzy. Not worth the risk. If you're doing books commercially. Having all the typography on just the black plate makes it easier if your book gets translated into different languages. So for my book, I'm using franca for the body, copy them for the headlines. I'm using super Clarendon, big and chunky. Like that. It's a nice contrast between the slab serifs, headline and subhead, fond, but also takes color really well because it has a lot of mass to it. Then A pretty subdued and serene pays for the body copy, but still has a little bit of style. If you're working in InDesign, you might take a little detour to learn about style sheets, character styles, paragraph styles. Character styles, basically just set up if you have a particular way of handling type again and again and again throughout the book. You could set that up with a character style attribute applied to type. Then if for some reason you change your mind on the type size or the weight or a different font. You just have to change it in the character style and then it changes it throughout the entire book. Paragraph styles are the realm of wizards. They are honestly a little bit beyond me. They're super useful. I've seen other book designers who are absolutely magic. Paragraph styles, where you just flow the type and based on paragraph breaks and everything it knows this is the headlight and this is the subnet. And it just flows it in. If you're going into large-scale book production, it's your dream to work for a publisher and just churns out, which may well be your dream, and it's a good one. If that's the case. I would urge you to take a class on really mastered and paragraph styles because it's an amazing tool. My practice is much more artisanal, so I do a lot of this stuff by hand and adjust things. And I cheat a ton on Nudge line weights by a quarter point to, to even out paragraph from page to page so that they're the same height. But this one has 27 lines and this one is 26 lines and swap cheaper letting a little bit. And people are great at paragraph styles, hate that stuff because it breaks their system. But if you can really master that system, it's really useful to know. I'm just not the person to teach that to. Your assignment. Start grappling with the type choices for your book. Put in your copy of your headlines, table of contents, anything, any textual information that you have, what event starts scrolling around with typeface. Do right now is layout, the intro, and the table of contents. So put spreads here. Let's start with the intro, which I've written. While you weren't looking just a little something because it's know who is the book for. Ultimately, it's for me and I'll probably be the only real audience for it. I'll put it in the class so you can look at the PDF if you like, then you can read it here certainly. So I'm just going to do some very quick basic type setting here just by feel. As always, typesetting interests like a nice little in and out, but might actually rewrite some of this just to make a nicer rag. And they will have a little drop cap, got a little, little bit of flair going to grab one of these goes. Slow, have to bother with a formatting. Smaller. Take those first few words. That's nice. Right here. It's called wrap-around. It's always easier to bust a move stylistically and just do a sort of look at me kind of thing. And sometimes it's really fun and sometimes that's appropriate. But always let your content guide you. What best represents the content. Make some choices. If you take some screenshots, post them in the forum and we'll talk about it. And then I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Laying Out the Images: Okay, and then here are our image pages. Let's start laying out since x. What can we do here? What immediately calls me, first of all, I just want to get this image out of there. Because it's fabulous. Pop that in here because it's just two adorable four words. Make sure that everything goes to the bleed line. If indeed you want the image to bleed, trim to the edges. Look at the cuteness. Let me check in links, sizes, okay? This is the thing you care about, which is the effective PPI for 24, 21 by 385, which is sufficient, but also tells me plenty of space. I've got plenty of resolution. Effective PPI is 395300 is fantastic. Three other girls grade and go a little bit below 300 is what you want. That's a nice spread. If I come across something in the book, we go, That looks pretty good. I don't know. Maybe I'll put something here. Put something there. What can we put there? Maybe I'll use these three because they're so funny, but they're also on that same towel. Grab these three, pop those in here. And then a little bit of a film strip these together as a little column. This is kind of how I like to do it. I mean, there's you can set up grids for sure if you like, into that sort of thing. For me, I just bought up against each other and then I just go onto my keyboard and do arrow keys, 1234. That's good already. I like that. It's my book. Only have page numbers. Sometimes more trouble than they're worth, but doesn't demonstration thing. Let's do a page number. Go to type, insert. Special character markers are on page number. And I'm going to use my go-to type face. Great. I'm going to make it real, make it seven points. And where am I going to place it? So this would be a place to put it in the safety margin. So that would work. It also feels quite heavy there. So look, go back and change it. And that's sort of central. Live in is pretty standard. So that works. Okay. That's a little boring. So what I'm going to do word products up here and I'm going to put a margin there. So this is already looking pretty nice. So now we basically just do that. However many times I'm told the book was full. Before I go on, I want to do a little bit of sweetness. Image, original. First move. Layers, adjustment layer of hair, big believer and saturated colors. They're not all. The darks, a little darker, midtones, a little lighter. These are things that work well on press. So you can see it here. It just gives it a little bit more contrast. The lambdoid, I want to do any retouching. Usually I always get a little courtesy paths if I'm dealing with people, you know, get rid of any blemishes. Andy Warhol had a good guideline. If it's something that would vanish within a few days off of face than it shouldn't be in the image. Sort of talking about pimples and things like that. These are kittens. I feel like probably not necessary, but still this bugs me and walked me a tiny little bit. And this just shows you mildly crazy person that nice sharp edge dwell on it any sharper unless, let's see. It's pretty crunchy right away. Because I've said really, you know, I am learning to go with the sharpen this because in print it does tend to pop better on the page. Where to get my saturation tool. Saturate. Do tremendous amount. That's alright. Well I think that looks pretty great. I'm just going to hit save on that. Actually, you know what, let me save it as a TIF. Right now it's still JPEG. If you save as a JPEG, then you don't get editable layers and you'd never know when you have to go back and fix something, alright? And then we'll do the same with these. This can be pretty quick. You can see that these are a little bit fuzzier. I'm going to go to hue saturation. It's skews a little bit green to me. Is this the way to fix that? No. Sometimes you start, it doesn't quite work out where to go to curves. And I'm just going to take a little bit of green out of that. Little bit more neutral. Right? There you go. Yeah, I like that better. But also regarding here, sharpen a little bit sharpening and sort of my go-to move with a lot of this stuff. Then on this one I did very little, so I'm just going to save it pretty cool already. That's looking good. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Sequencing Your Book: Let's talk about sequencing. We've done a great job gathering old material. You set up a mood board, you have to find the tone, started setting up documents. Now, let's talk about the order in which the information is presented. This is a really fun step and it's going to take a little bit of time. What I like to do is I like to put all of the material that I have to work with into the book. All the things I've chosen, all the things that I know have to be included. And this is also a great way to get past procrastination hurdles. And then when everything is in the document, you start sequencing. Because the order in which the information is presented is hugely important. Because that can determine how people see the subject, how they get drawn in. It's like making a playlist is a good way of thinking about it, is what song leads to the next song. This song is going to lead gradient to this song. And then I'm kind of in a mellow mood. So I'm going to maintain that mellow mood for two or three more songs. But then I want to really kind of hit somebody with a dance track and really bring the energy backup. That there's a little bit of drama to the way the book on folds. That's what I'm talking about. The way I did it for my book is that I just designed a lot of spreads that I thought would be great. Where the images go well together, where it tells a story that the kittens are playing or the kids are sleeping. Then I'm going to print out thumbnails of all those pages and all those spreads would have cut them out and I'd be like this big. I'm going to lay them out on my table. I'm going to start moving them around. And the way I handle it is I start making little clusters. I'll take some, there's gonna be some images where I go or some pages where I go. Oh, these two need to go together. Okay, Well, if these two are together, then I want to have this third one in here, or maybe in the middle. Now that I keep doing that, but keep building these clusters. And I usually stick them together with tape so that I know this is a cluster. This is something that I wanted to have appear together. And then as I get a few clusters and I go, Oh, well, this cluster should really go in front of this one, but maybe behind this other one. And then I start moving that around and then it'll stick two of those clusters together were three. Dimensionally, a whole sequence will emerge, and I'll go through that. Okay, well how does that feel? That feels pretty good. This image maybe, or this spread maybe wants to go to the front. And then maybe that means that I have to take this spread and move it more towards the middle. This is much easier to do with little pieces of paper on a surface than digitally. The problem with digital is that it looks too neat and too clean, too quickly. Much better to do it with little printouts that you can shuffle around and look a little bit ramshackle. So that's your task. Put things into your file, start making pages. Then. When you feel like you have all the material in their print out little thumbnails and cut them out, lay them out on the surface. Start making clusters, linking the clusters together and create a sequence. As always, if you'd like to share it in our shared space, I'm happy to comment on it, give you feedback, or just do it to the part where you're happy. Another good way of organizing the content is to use your table of contents. And this is more true if you're dealing with a lot of texts rather than images. Because if you print out 100 thumbnails of dense texts pages, that's not going to do you any good on the table. So in that case, I might utilize the table of contents, the right that out. That is a matter of fact, if you're pitching a book to a publisher, one of the first things I'll ask you for is Charles, the table of contents, because that's how they understand the content of the book. Again, refer back to the notes you made on who is your audience and what would be interesting to them. What would draw them in? What will give them a better understanding of your subject? What we'll take them on an emotional journey, what we'll, what we'll just create a good ride for them. Because that's really what it is. You're creating an experience. And what we'll facilitate that best. Once you've established your structure, you've established your sequence. It's also a good moment to flesh things out as you're putting it together. And as the thing really starts taking shape as a journey, you may notice gaps. May say, Oh, you know what? I really thought I had this item covered. But it turns out this feels a little thin to me. I need to get a little bit more material. You may write more text. You may get somebody to write more text for. You may take some additional images. You might say, oh, this really needs an infographic here, or it needs Something. This is a good point for that. Also see, do I have everything that I thought I have? Because it's fairly easy for our brains to fill in the gaps. Again, I pretty much, I'm pretty sure I have this covered. Sometimes you don't and this is probably a spot where you can see it most easily. And you're also hopefully still at a point in your production timeline where you have a little bit of space to generate additional things. The way I approached this stuff, especially with photo books, is when there isn't sort of an inherent structure with hears. Here's type. That means laying out. I just generate pages, see what works. And then I go in and then I sequenced. This is actually a pretty good way of doing it is just to use InDesign. Because I'm doing here is to go through and see thing and just scroll through the pages like this. And then I'll start laying some things out that I know I want in particular places. Like I know these two pages are about when I left the kittens into the rest of the apartment because I kept them in the kitchen most of the time. Then at the end, I let them out on the last day because they were always trying to get out and you're always so curious to see that was at the end of their stay. So I'm going to want to want to have that at the end of the book. Conversely, there are some where they're just brand new and I'm going to go with a sort of vaguely chronological approach. I'm just I'm going to order it really loosely for right now, just to get things in roughly an order that makes sense. But I think as you're going through, as you're doing the sequencing, always look at how things relate from page to page and make adjustments as you see fit. So this has got to go on now for hours and hours. This is one of those long processes. So that's how you start. You just, you find some anchor points you build sequences around. So I know that I will end up here. I want to know that this right, I know that this has to go on towards the end. And then I'm going to find the things that build to that, that go into those sort of key frames. So now I'm just going to go through and I'm going to sequence everything to where I'm happy with it. So this is your task. Start sequencing your book. Start putting together clusters. Started putting together sequences of clusters. Find where the holes are. Start filling those holes. Start generating little extras. If you think you need them. For all things you don't, please post your progress for all of us to see. And maybe we can chime in, maybe we can help. And then I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Aesthetics: Cover, Back Cover, & Spine: In this lesson, we're going to talk about three important aspects of creating a book, determining the voice of your book, creating a palette of design tricks you might want to use. And finally, creating a great cover, back and spine. Of course, this is at the heart of what we do as book designers. We set the tone and we give the whole thing the shape. We give the content a shape that makes it sync. To me what makes a good design is when it feels like it's always look the way it looks now, where it has an air of being inevitable or you look out and you go, Oh, yeah, of course, it looks like that. How else would have possibly look? As I approach a project? And especially if it's something that I haven't done before or if it's something where I want to push outside of what I've done before. I'll turn to my collection. We'll pull things out and I'll say, Oh, I really like this particular thing. I might grab this book again. I might say, Oh, I like this roundy type or I like the way these shapes are. I liked this diamond thing, or I like the, I like this color scheme, for example. And then I'll take a picture of it printed out and put it on a board or I'll actually just looked like that. I'll just lay it out and have it there. But even with that, I would probably scan a page printed out and stick it up somewhere just so that I can have a number of style cues all in a big a board. Just because I think it's important for our brains to see the totality of things we want to incorporate. And it's a lot easier to see connections that go out. I keep picking things that are magenta, or I keep picking things that are very moderate, or that are really whimsical or lyrical looking. It's all about externalizing your thoughts so that you can have a little bit of distance and say, Oh, I like that, I like that. Well, actually now that I see it all together, this doesn't really fit, but I'll save it for the next project. It's all about making your thinking manifest and put it in a shape that you can revisit over time. Let's talk about the cover. The cover is one of the most important aspects of the book because it's the first thing that people see. It's like a movie poster for your book. So if you want to have an image on the cover, make it the best image you have. Make it just something that pops out at. You. Use really bold typography or use if you use restrained typography, make it super restraint. Really take all the choices you're making and really amp them up. The cover is the space. For high amplitudes. We will contrast. You want eye-catching things. You really want to draw people in. If you're doing this for a book that will be sold online, keep in mind that your design has to survive being reduced this tiny of a thumbnail. But on the whole, just really make something that immediately makes people go. Oh, what is this book about? That said, also make it reflective of the content and have great composition. Have something where there's a clear hierarchy, where you pick your most important element that you want people to notice first and you give that the most space, the most impact, most color, multiple weight. You might want to have giant type with a teeny tiny image. Maybe you don't want to have an image at all. Maybe it's just typography. Maybe it's just typography and it's a teeny tiny, It's just a tiny little word and the center or something like that. Give it a clear visual hierarchy. You are the director of this little film on paper. It's your job to direct where your viewers eye goes first and the second and third. If you're creating a book that's going to be sold in stores or online in a larger format. You're going to want to put a barcode on the back cover. And there are some rules that you have to follow there. You have to have a little bit of a border around it needs to be on a white background or on a very, very light background. The numbers under the bar code, you can change to any font as long as you have about, I think it's a half-inch of the barcode, unimpeded, unobstructed, on a super light background, preferably white. Then you can do with the rest as you like. You want the number there in case somebody else to key it in by hand if the scanner isn't working, for example, but it can be any font, doesn't matter. You can also have the barcode sprout into flowers at the top, which I've done on a bunch of records that up because it's a really fun thing to do. It's a really fun move to do I would also say that the barcode should be 100% black. And then there's the spine. The spine sometimes becomes an afterthought and doesn't get quite the love it deserves. I always like doing really fun spines for my cover. Because as you can see, for most books, most of their lives, all you see is the spine. Have a little bit of fun. Make it something where people go out. At the same time. Also, I tend to keep the type fairly big on the spine because it is just an issue of can you retrieve the information that brings us back to Who's the audience for the book. Makes sure that your cover and back and spine work for the audience that you've defined. If you're designing for an audience of people over the age of 20 or over the age of 40 or 50. Don't make your type teeny tiny. Give people a little bit of a hand, create a mood board, and then take a first stab at designing the exterior of your book. Now I've already set up a file because I didn't want to bore you with getting all the specifications input. But this is how it's set up my blog project. So these are the dimensions that they've given me. This is the bleed for the wraparound because I'm gonna do an image wrap around. The bleed is pretty substantial. Safety, which is actually not that bad. And then they've given me a spine measurement. But what I'm going to do instead is I'm just going to make two squares because it's in 7-by-7 book somewhere to do this. Duplicate that over. So I know those are my covers. And then what's leftover is gonna be the spine. Not that complicated. I've already looked, sort of picked a few things that could be potential covers, like this one a lot. How does this work for me for size, plenty of resolution, logarithmic go metastatic. As I'm scaling this up, I keep looking to the effective PPI. That's still okay. And what I would like as I would like to get that hot, the frame, like to maybe rotate this a little bit so that the top edge is parallel to the book because that kind of stuff. That's looking pretty great. So there's a candidate then with covers, It's hard to just do it and say, Oh, this is, it might be for you, but it's sort of exploratory thing. So I usually, what I do is I'll go and I'll do a few different variations. Rank of fields in sigma, fields not adequate to the task. Let me go with Super Clarendon. As I'd like, super clarinet, spider like this is because it's going to be nice and chunky. I can put it together pretty tightly like that. Then sometimes on the spine because the spine is fairly narrow, it's tough to go with uppercase, lowercase because the ascenders and descenders are going to limit your size too much. Let's give it a fun color. Like to pull something out of a photo. Then I'm going to take the marble to make it mortal colored, feels a little bit brown to me. We'll go here to my palette. And we'll go into make it little bit more gray. And I'm a permanent ink guys will do it this way. I just know it's more intuitive to me. Now let's start to look like something, right? So that's, I'm starting to feel pretty good about your just ambling along the path that leads to a finished book. You're not in your head guard. Oh, no. I've done that. And that's no fun. And it also doesn't yield a good result. Much better to just go a little bit here, a little bit there. As a general note, as long as you work a little bit on the project every day, it'll be vastly easier than if you say, well, wait till the last minute and then we're just going to cram everything in because the pressure helps me focus. Okay. You have your task. Go for it. Awesome things in the class so we can all take a look at it if you like. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Strategizing a Book Project: Let's spend a few minutes to talk about workflow. Books can be huge projects. And there are very different ways of getting from point a to point B. Early on in my career, I designed a 300 page pitch book, Horton ad agency, in one continuous 36 h stretch. The entire time the team was generating things to put into the book. As I was putting together a structure and a sequence and everything and figuring out how to get it produced. And that worked only because I've had to work because we only have those 36 h. And I was in my mid-twenties and insane and my body was able to handle that kind of stress. This is not the ideal workflow that I would recommend to you. Create space for yourself. This is a lot of what this class is about. Break things into small chunks that are frightening or daunting so that you can keep working on things continuously. One of the big pitfalls is to work in big bursts. I'm going to work on this all weekend. I'm going to take all week off to work on this thing. And that can work, but it gets very stressful. And it becomes stressful for you and that stress gets passed on to the people around you. If that's your team or if it's your family or your partner. And books are wonderful important, but they're also not worth that sort of cost. So make sure that as you're working on your book or any project really, you stay in touch with the needs of your mind and your body and your soul. And make sure that you keep an awareness of how you're doing. Because this is one of those projects. Books are the kinds of projects that can become a real vortex. And you really can get drawn into it. And it's all you see. And it's so big and there's always one more thing to do it, almost always one more thing to consider. And it's easy to get lost in the world of the project. Check in with yourself. Check in with yourself about what's my level of focus? Am I hyper-focused on this right now? Is that useful to me? This isn't a sprint. This is a long distance race. You have to maintain your energy over a long period of time. Like a night off, watch a movie, go have a snack. It's important work. It's not that important. And it'll be easier to come back a little bit fresh if you get scared of any particular part of the process, work on something else. Like, You know what? I'm getting stuck on the sequencing thing. Noodle around all the typeface is a little bit. I can find a typeface that looks exciting. Let me just pick a color palette to put in the backroom. Or let me Photoshop this image while my brain is working on something else in the background. To that end, I've distilled a lot of this into some checklists for you that are available in the class and the resource section where you can just check things off so that you don't have to hold it all in your head. The class resource section, download the checklist, you'll see what's missing. We will have a much better overview. And for me that always calms me down a little bit. Because then I can really start prioritizing and say, okay, there's some things that I used to take care of that aren't super important. I'll leave those, but there's one thing that I usually do right now. It's not so big, but I'll do it right now. Your task for this lesson. Check in with yourself. Get into a habit of seeing how you're doing. Maybe make some notes so that in future projects you can go back and you can say, oh, this was the point last time where I was really freaking out. How do I avoid that this time? Maybe that maybe you write out a little timeline for yourself and say, Okay, what do I still have to do? And then maybe put that into an order where you go. Okay, well, this seems manageable and I do this in this list, given herself just enough of a framework to keep yourself accountable and give yourself flexibility, and give yourself a little bit of grace 12. Finalizing Your Design: Let's talk about finalizing your content. You've put everything into the document, sorted out your size. Together, the sequence, you've edited your images, everything is looking good. You're starting to get ready to go. Now it's time to make some production choices. You want to talk to your printer about this. Then the first thing you want to see is, well what's available? As I can also spark ideas. But on a very basic level, we want to confirm that you're still happy with your choice of hardcover versus soft cover. Dust jacket. What material you want to take a binding on the whole hardcover books are more expensive, certainly significantly more expensive to produce. You could also charge more for them. Well, that can work out. Thus, jackets can be tricky. It can be very pretty. But they also tear. If you think it's going to be a book that's going to see a lot of handling. Jacket might not be your first choice. If you're making a book that's going to be in bookstores, know that does jackets when they tear often lead to the book being returned to your distributor. If you do want to do a dusk jacket, do something great with it. Paperbacks are generally cheaper, much cheaper, especially when they're perfect bound where you just have pages that are cut flush and then glued together at the spine. But they fall apart over time. They fall apart pretty quickly. But they are more affordable to do. Another thing to keep in mind with paperbacks is as you're going into the spine, you lose area. Because as you can see here, it's just loose pages that are glued together. There's a little bit of glue that squeezes in-between the pages and holds them together. So there's a little area at the bottom here where the packages are all stuck together. And so when you open the book, you're going to lose area here. And you're going to have situations where an image, we'll go into the gutter. And you're going to lose image area than if you're dealing with that check with your printer if they compensate for that fold. And this tends to be a big problem with very thick books and with very little books. Especially with very little books. Because there's so little area that you need to put a lot of glue in. The way around it is the split your image and half across two textboxes. Hold them slightly apart, and then duplicate the image in the center a little bit. It gets really tricky. Um, I would just be very careful about using what's called an image crossover. Having an image scroll across the entire spread. If you're dealing with a perfect bound book, make sure you can do it. But it's a great look. And it can be very dramatic inside the book. Just make sure that there isn't something crucial in the center area. And you'll see it in my book. There are a few image crossovers. And it's usually a kitten belly where you can lose a little bit and you're not losing anything about the information. You're not losing any information that's crucial. As you get your files ready for press. Make sure you double-check everything, make sure your triple and quadruple check everything. Proofread cannot stress this enough. There's often a tendency to rush this step and it will lie to you. Hire a proofreader if you can afford it. If you can't, get different family members and friends to read this, read it on paper. It's shocking the mistakes that I've missed onscreen. But I noticed when I read the thing on a printout. You can afford extra time to proofread. The worst thing is when you notice typos when you're on press. Because if it's a bad one, you have to stop the press. They have to pull the printing plates off the press. They have to make new plates. They have to hang the new plates on the press. They have to adjust everything again. It will cost you thousands of dollars. You are going to look very bad. The printer is going to be unhappy. The client is going to be unhappy. If your client wants to rush through proofing, tell them that it's a bad idea. This is part of your responsibility. You have to hold him by the hand and say I know it's tempting. Do not rush this. We need to double-check this. If they insist. Have them sent you an e-mail saying, I acknowledge that you advise me the periphery this we're okay to go ahead without it. Sometimes asking for that email gets them to reconsider. Get everybody to sign off on things. Make sure that you do a preflight check on your image resolution. Indesign preflight panel. Make sure that all the resolutions are. We want 300 DPI, but 75 you can get by sometimes depends on the nature of the image. But be aware and don't use images that are significantly lacking and resolution. Also, what you're looking for and the number you're really looking at is effective resolution, effective DPI, or effective PPI. Because you can have a 300 DPI image. But it's an inch by an inch. And then you blow it up 12 by 12. Insurance. That's no longer a 300 DPI image. That's now a 15 DPI image and it's going to look like crap. Effective PPI is once you want to check and you want that to be in the 300 DPI range, makes sure that you check your safeties and your bleed areas. These are things that your printer will kick back to you if you did it wrong. But it just caused time. Better to go through one more time. A lot of times, what I find is really effective is to render out a PDF with bleed and just flip through it very quickly. Because the sort of animation effect you get will make it very clear when something goes out of pattern. I was like, Oh, lovely bleed, bleed, bleed. Oh, there's a white sliver. You go back and go Oh, yeah, Missing one. And then you can fix it. That's a trick that I usually use. Make sure your sequence is correct. Make sure you have no text that's hidden at the bottom of a textbox where it's cropped off. Indesign again, it will tell you these sort of things. But make sure you double-check that everything is there. That's a big thing these days. It used to be that you could have any paper at anytime in any quantity. And now there are papers that may just not be available for months. Or you may get them within the time allotted. What it's going to cost you way too much money. Make sure that you're picking resources that are available when you need them at the price that you need them out. Make sure you talk about all the details that are important to your printer. It varies by Printer. Some have concerns that other partners may not have. Some may want you to make decisions that other printers will make for you. What are the most fun things of book design is picking the head and tail band. What does the head and tail band? It's this thing. We drew a hardcover book. There's a little piece of cloth that holds the lock pages in the binding and disguises that little glue edge. There's a whole little sample book where you can pick between 30 or 40 different head bands. It's so fun. Ask about head and tail bands. You'll thank me. I have put together a printing spec sheet for you that's available in the resource section. Where you can just check boxes for what you want on your book. Sizes in colors you want, if you want special Pantone colors, for example, or if you're in Europe, HK as colors, I believe. If you want deep bossed, height will recover. If you want satin, linen, what sort of paper you want. And it's a way for you to know a lot of the choices that are available to you and to put them down in a very clear and accountable way for your printer. 13. Printing Options: Specs & Steps: Let's talk about the printing methods that are available to you. The thing that I do most often that rules my thinking is traditional offset printing, big press, giant rollers, sheets of paper being fed into the back. That's what I say printing, that's what I think of. There's also digital printing, which is also sheet fed, or they're big sheets of paper that go in the back that runs through the incus a little bit different. It's harder to do special effects, things like Pantone colors for example. But those are much better for shorter runs because you could just run ten books through that. And it's fairly cost-effective because you don't have to set up individual plates. You don't have to rent a giant industrial age machine. It's pretty quick and flexible. It's very hard to correct color on it. You basically have to take the file off the press, make changes at the file level, put it back on, and do that. You can choose the colors a little bit, but it's not as flexible. With a big real press. You got to press checks and you can say, Okay, well, we want to have a little less magenta. Or as a matter of fact, you go in and you say, Well, I just want this to be warmer or it feels a little bit too cold or feels a little bit too heavy. It's a little bit too light. Then you can make a lot of adjustments to bring things in line. Also from spread to spread. From signature, signature. A signature being a little booklet of 16 pages that makes part of the book. This is how books are constructed, is that you print on a big sheet. The sheet gets folded down. The signatures of eight pages, 12 or 16 pages, sometimes 24, the edges get cut off, it gets sold, and then you have a little booklet and a number of those booklets get stuck together, glued together, put into a case that you have a book. So you have the press checks so that you can keep the colors consistent from signature, the signature. Those are the benefits of traditional offset printing. It's also cheaper when you're talking about larger runs. So if you're making thousands of books, It's going to be more economical to do it on a big press rather than on a digital press. Digital presses great for short runs. You can also get very vibrant colors on the digital press caused that sometimes now runs with six colors or eight colors. So you can really see benefits and greens and blues, for example. It would be very, very expensive. Thousands of books, that format also tends to be smaller, so you're sometimes locked into smaller signatures, which again makes the process more expensive. Once you've confirmed with specs with your printer and you've chosen a process where you say, okay, where I prayed this digitally, we're going to print this traditional offset. You're going to get into the preprocessed process. That means proofing. You're going to collect your files for output, which just means that you have your layout. You have all the images, you have, all your texts, you have all your typefaces, and you transmit that to your printer. They will make two kinds of proof for a book. It will be in color proofs. And they will make a folding proof. Because the proof is just that. It's to see if the color is correct. The folding proof, It's called an effigy for folded and gathered, tends to be an inkjet proof on fairly sandpaper, but it's pretty good on both sides and it's folded and gathered exactly as a final book would read. This is to check sequence to make sure that none of the pages are upside down, which happens that everything is in the correct order, that you're not missing any page numbers, any of that stuff. So look for that on the color proofs. Check the color. You've everything looks the way you want it to look. This is your final chance to circle things and say, Oh, this area is too dark. This area is too light. This be a little warmer. Can this be a little cooler? On the whole? I like to run my proofs light. So if I have an image that's a little bit denser, I'd much rather pulled back and create a lighter image. Because in my years of printing, I can count on one hand the times I've seen images. Lighter on press. As soon as you go on press, things tend to get heavier. It's easier on press, push more ink onto the roller than to starve the roller. Because once you starve the roller, things start getting a little bit. If you are maintaining density on keeping the machine running, their actual mechanical problems that start occurring. Also, again, check for typos Check for missing imagers, check for low resolution. That's a big one. Or you can sometimes only see it all approve. See if you have gradations, if there's banding where you can see that it's not a smooth gradation, but there are little steps. And then ask your printer how to get rid of that. Usually adding noise helps. But there are various tricks you can do. Anything, you notice, anything where you go. As I write, circle it, ask somebody. It is vastly cheaper and easier to fix these things and address these things before your press. Once giant metal plates are on a giant machine, everything gets more expensive. So as much as you can put that earlier in the process, the better off you're going to be. Well, here's a tip that I use that I don't see a lot of people use it. If you are in Photoshop, go into image, adjust, Shadow, Highlights. It's one of those old effects from way back in the Photoshop, one or two era. And just go into the shadows slider, slider to maybe three or 4%, maybe five per cent. Check the preview. Then what it does is it opens up the mid tones and it doesn't somehow in a way that curves and levels and HDR toning dose do that. Just open it up a little bit and it'll give you a lot more flexibility on press. If you went to light, it's easy to push a little bit more ink and darken it back down. But I'd much rather you be in a situation where you have to add a little bit of ink, that to say there's just no detail here. And that's a good way of making photos look great on uncoded stock. Sometimes you use an uncoded stock now too, because the effect is the same, but it's really crucial for uncoated. And then you'll get to the blessed day. You'll have a press check. Your book is finished, It's proofed, it's ready to go to press. And you're going to do a press check. That can be a little bit intimidating if you haven't done it before because you're in a big industrial space, what are you looking for? Does everything look the way it does on the proof? That's really the mission is you want it to look like the proof you signed off on it. Especially if you're working with a client, you want it to look like the proof that the client signed off on. Always make your client sign because this protects you from liability. You don't want to go rogue on anything. It is your client's job to sign off on the proof is your client's job to sign off on proofreading. You are there to advise and to guide and you certainly have accountability. You certainly have a responsibility to find things. But the final responsibility for what goes on press, if you're working with a client is the client. And so it pays to ask, is there anything that you'd like to do the step? Once everything is ready, then sheets will drive for a few days probably, unless you use an aqueous coating. Another tip. If you need the book to move very quickly and you're behind. You may have to switch from, for example, a spot gloss varnish to what's called an aqueous coating, which is a lacquer coating that goes over the entire sheet. So you can't do a little spot effects. It doesn't look quite as nice, but it drives the ink instantly because it gets baked on. Then you can immediately send things to the binary. It tends to be an option of last resort for me. If you're finding yourself in a situation where you're behind schedule and you have to move quickly, and aqueous coating can save you a few days. Once all that's done, the sheets go off to the binary. They get folded, they've gathered, they got sold, they get glued. They're going to start on the binding. Whether that's the perfect binding or soft cover book or the case finding for hardcover book. We're talking about bookbinding. There's so many cool special effects you can use. You can use foils, you can do boss type, you can emboss type. You can use cool fabrics. You can have dicots, talk to your printer and see what's available. If you're working with a print on demand service like Ingram or blurb, obviously your options are significantly more limited. There are a few standardized pipelines you can go into. But if you're doing a book that's just for you or you're doing maybe ten copies or 20 copies. You can hack the process a little bit. For example, you couldn't make a book that's printed where the white jacket or with a white paper wrap. So it's just a blank book. And then you get brushes or stamps, or naive, or a flight and thrower. And you customize each book as you get it. There's a lot you can do, but dazzle that bad boy. That's what I say. Might do that with this one. We'll see I haven't decided yet. But be aware always of the process that generates your piece. Again, the files that computer files are like really fancy punchcards that go into the machine. You are driving a big industrial machine, make a physical object. And the more you can know about how the machine works and how you can affect what the machine does. The more of a palette gives you to do interesting things. 14. Preparing Your Book for Printing: I've taken the sequence that I cooked up on paper. I've put that into the document now that I made a few little changes that came out of that, I add a little bit of type to the opening spread. So now it has the first day arrived statement because it just worked best grammatically to just have a wall putting this thing where they're kind of scared and they're crate going to lightening up to assume full credit. And then getting kinda curious. Then we get into the meat of things. So I have everything here the way I like it. I also got the page count to 80 pages, which is important because it needs to be divisible by 16. Because that's how you print that. Because you have 16 pages to the sheet on press. You have to check with your predator. Sometimes if you're dealing with a large book, you may only get 12 pages or eight pages. Or if your own digital press, you might even just get four-page signatures. But 16 is pretty common. So every 16 pages you're going to have a situation where one-page has gotta be on one signature or the opposing page has got to be on the next one. So you want to make sure that you plan for that if you can. So right here, this is page 16 and this is page 17. So there's nothing here that crosses over. So there's nothing to worry about. Let's look at page 32. 32. It's gotta be the end of signature or 2.33 is going to be the first page of signature three. No problem. So 32 plus 16 means 48 and they are to have nothing crossing over. And then 48 plus 16.64, again, we got nothing crossing over. Great. Crossovers can be difficult on press. So if you had something like this, for example, and you have this page, you have the left page or one signature, and the right page on another signature. Getting those colors to match up has ramifications on other things that are on the same spreadsheet. So you want to be really careful of that. If you can avoid it, go forward. It's not an on surmountable problem by any means for their degree that the project allows it. Sometimes you just have to barrel through and things fall away, fall under New Deal with us. But if you have the luxury of checking, do check. No, I'm going to go through everything right now and sort of print preview. Page one. I'm going to look at all the guides so I can see the bleed in the safeties. And I'll just go through and I'll just make sure that everything has all the bleed that it needs to be our first go around that grade. Right here. I can see that the box doesn't go quite to the bleed. Know if does. Right. This is fine. So we had 48 to 49 is where the signature switches over 12345678. So this is in the middle of the signature. So theoretically this is just an unbroken sheets. So if you've got a bound book with that sown with thread, this would basically folded, flattened would lose nothing. This is together on the press sheet like this because I'm not entirely sure whether or not blurb truly sows the books or does a perfect bound with a hardcover? I think what they do, we're going to assume that I'm going to lose a little bit of image here. I'm going to show you a little trick and overdo it. I'm going to copy this and paste it in place. So now I have the second half here. Now. I've sold my assistant in half. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to just move the left side to the left a few clicks. The right side, the right a few clicks. Just a little bit. And then I'm going to open that image box to the center so you can see if you zoom in that are duplicated this a little bit. You can also see how overlay sharpen this image is and that it's a little bit gnarly. But I just loved the idea of having them stretched out across spreads. So the purpose of drama and sticking with it You can see that this is here twice. These things are duplicated. So as it's glued together, it's going to look wonderful image again. If you're sending this to a printer, it will still give you some warnings here. 99 of the images use RGB color space. That's fine. Package that up. Auctions not really necessary. Put it here. Three. We copy the fonts. Linked graphics, update graphically instead of the package. Half-finished exceptions only I'm sure means something. I've no idea what to include funds initial hit. Yes. And then we package that up, which takes a few seconds. I always like doing that because sometimes you'll pull images from other folders. In the heat of the moment. This is a good way of having all your fonts together. Even though they don't seem to be showing up. Oh, it's just thinking about it. I see. Okay. So there's all that. I've kept it super clear enough company Franca. Then here all the images rate. Then you would take that and you would send that to the printer. In my case, I have to make a PDF for blurb. And we're going to do that. Now. There's actually blurb PDF export, preset. As you do that, make sure, remember we had that fold layer and show that. Make sure that that's turned off. You can really hear. This also happens. Let's just put W and here because I'm was stolen textbox when I did the keyboard command or the premium. That's why you gotta, you have to proofread everything, look five times. So make sure that this is switched off. Then go to Export. Export. Then nothing happens. That's just how we like it. When that's happening, happening in the background. What about Floyd is keeping and then we can do one more pass here. Okay? Now we have the turnout for the book. And I'm going to go through it. Immediately noticing mistake here. You go. High fire. That looks pretty good. 15. Print Review: We're almost at the end of the journey. You've received the final book from the printer. Come back from the binary. How do you deal with that? This doesn't get talked about a lot. That it should. Because whenever I get the book back from the binary, just get this knot in my stomach. Because no matter how experienced you are, no matter how diligent you've been, how much you've tried to foresee every possible error. Something's got to slip through the cracks. You're going to have a typo. Some colors gonna go weird. Something's got to go a little bit about the way you want it to and how do you deal with it, because you've put so much energy into it and all of a sudden you notice something, you're bound to notice something. I always noticed something. That's a hard moment. It's going to happen. Let me give you a little bit of a therapy shortcut based on how often I've talked about this with my therapist. Did you do the best you could do? Did you work hard? Did you go through the checklist? Where are you careful or careless? No. Probably not, right. Like you did everything you were supposed to do, your human. I certainly have tried all my career to create the perfect book, perfect project. The thing where everything is exactly as intended, if not somehow better. And that's the pursuit, that's the journey. That's what keeps us coming back, is you learn a little every time you do a little better the next time and you keep evolving. You keep figuring out the things that don't work. So when you get the book back, you're gonna see brushstrokes and the painting. You're going to see the mark of the acts in the sculpture that you've chopped from the very living woods. This is just that, and don't let the industrial machinery around fool you. What I would suggest is look at the book when you got it, both through it, see if there are any obvious nightmare disasters that somehow snuck in. Then put the book on the shelf. Day or two. Call your printer. So thank you. Ask your printer if you're dealing with a client situation, ask if the client has received a settlement. If not, ask when the client is going to receive a sample, let the client know what to tell them. Say, Hey, you're going to receive your first sample on Tuesday. Let's set up a call or I'll check in with you then, see how you feel about it. And then keep in mind in a client situation that it's their book just as much as if it's your book. No matter of fact, it's more their book then your book. And your job is to design a good book for them, but also for them to have a good experience making your book with you. So when you know that they've received the book, reach out to them, say, hey, have you received the sample? Can call you. And I would say call them both text, email. Say, hey, can we get on a call? What did you think? And even if you found mistakes, There's a really good chance that they're just gonna be super excited and super happy, then it's your job not to screw with their excitement. Talk to them on the phone and say, Hey, how do you feel about it? More likely than not that we like, Oh my God, it's so great. Thank you so much. And they go, Hey, This was so wonderful. Thank you. Then everything's great. And then also let yourself, let yourself here that because you may still be in the vortex of like man on page 78, there was a thing that I wish was a micron to the left. When people tell you that they love what you did, let that get to you, let that reach you and touch you and say thank you. And if they do have a concern, then be open to that. Try not to get defensive. You've done a good job. You've you've worked through the process with them at every step. You've been accountable. Don't minimize stuff. Don't get attacked by it. Just hear what they have to say. Say, okay. Let me know what your concerns are. Please tell me and then they'll tell you and then you can say, Oh, yeah, I see that. Or Oh, yeah, I saw that. I didn't think that was a problem. Can you tell me why it's a problem for you and then just have a conversation or just be curious. Then say, Okay, I see that. I'm sorry that that happened. I'm sorry that that's affecting your enjoyment of the book? What can we do? Should we look at a reprint? How do you feel about it? Is it something that if we do a future edition, we should fix, gauge their level of distress. That's the nature of the process. These are complex things. And you came through it and you've got a real book on your hands. You have succeeded. Look back at it again. In a year or two, or in a month or two, or a week or two or whatever makes you feel comfortable. Then sort of check-in with a little bit, check-in with what your feelings are telling you, how your body feels when you look at it and see how it changes. There's this horrible art school trope. If you're a good artist, you are never happy with your work and you're always going to be dissatisfied because you're always striving. And I think that's just the worst. Toxic. You are meant to derive joy from the work you produce. You are allowed and encouraged. Be proud of what you do and to take joy from the results. The big day has come. We've received the first copy of the book from blurb. So we'll do a proper unbox. Check that out. How is that looking? One has a sticker on the back. Let's take that off immediately. How dare you are there? You put a sticker over my cat. Alright. So there you go. There's the book. Right away. I notice that the spine goes a little bit onto the back, which I don't love. The front, goes a little bit over to the spine, so everything is sort of moved over a little bit. And I was kind of a risk. This is a little bit of an issue with print-on-demand, is that there are just tolerances that you can't really do much about. This looks pretty nice. The colors a little bit darker than I expected. I expected it always gets to be a little bit darker, but it's a little bit darker than I thought, but it's quite juicy, so it's quite nice. I mean, that's, that's quite cute. Let's look at the inside. This is nice. They put an SLM paper on it. Let's look. So K, That looks good. But you do see, again, like how much area you lose in the center there. The paper is nice, it has a nice feel to it. The color, I think it's pretty good. I mean, it that worked out pretty well. So on the whole going through it right now the first time, I'm pretty happy with it. Yeah, the color is really nice. And some of the photos, like a lot of the photos really shine on this, I have to say so that's good. Yeah. And even the sort of fuzzy ones on this uncoded stock work out pretty well. So all in all, I'm pretty happy with this so far. Yeah. And the color correction here, it's not dead even between the two things. But it's close enough. Like, yeah, Here's a good illustration of what I was talking about is this line theoretically goes straight through and you get that little offset. And that's just what's, what's missing in this space in-between. Well, that's a pretty good That's a pretty nice close-up. Yeah. Remember seeing this worked out really great because we did put in, as you recall, a little extra area that really paid off. So in the case of blurb, I guess I would recommend you do that. There's a little bit of well, that's actually pretty good. I was going to say, is there a little bit of variance moving up and down? But it's pretty good. Then we have our final page there. Again, I think the biggest thing would be just how much you're losing in the gutter there, Then there's the end of it. So all in all, I'm really happy with the way this came out. It illustrates some of the issues that we've been talking about. Including that there are tolerances and production and sometimes you can anticipate it. In a more commercial situation, you would get greater precision on this. And you'd have a little bit more control over that. For blurb. I should have maybe anticipated that a little bit more. But for the whole I'm pretty happy with it. So I have no complaints. And then you can do things like fan it out and you can see some of the design language of the margins that are pretty consistent. But if field is going in the hand and I mean, I would have absolutely no problem handing not to somebody as a gift. Being pretty proud of it. So there you go. Of course, there remains the final test for the book. How will the new foster kitten react to it? This is green. What do you think green? These are your forebears. Like this book. Are you interested in it? Pick it up. Would you give it a read? I hope you'll share your finished book with us in the project section. I'd love to see what you've done. I loved to apply you and cheer you on. Some cool photos of the thing. Show us what you've done. Because I bet it's awesome. I want to see it 16. Conclusion: Thank you so much for going on this journey with me. Really appreciate your time. I'm so excited to see the books you've made for this class. And I'm even more excited to see the books that you're gonna make. Subjects that means something to you. Pick subjects that the world should know about and make wonderful books that expand all our horizons. See you at the bookstore 17. Bonus: Working With Clients: Welcome to the bonus features. If you're doing books for clients. If maybe you are already a working designer or an experienced designer and you just haven't done a book project yet. I wanted to give you some extra resources. The most important thing when dealing with a book project with clients is the intake conversation. I often get approached by clients saying, you are desirable. This is not surprising. I am a book designer. I advertise myself and such, of course they come. But then I asked him a lot of questions. I don't just go, Oh, great, great, great. Well sign here. I need to know what they want, why they want it. And I would urge you to do the same. Take the time, ideally meet them in person. What projects are long projects with a lot of moving parts. The financial stakes are considerable because it's not cheap to do. Have a long conversation. Ask questions about why they want to do a book. Do they want to do it? To sell to a publisher? Do they want to sell it directly to bookstores? Who they want to sell it at talks, do they want to send it around as a promotional item to drum up business, to be invited as an expert to conferences is a purely a vanity object. Just have something where everybody goes, Oh my God, look at this cool gift you gave us. Maybe they just want an amazing gift to impress people were just totally valid. That leads to a whole set of choices that's completely different from we just have an idea that we want out in the world. And we don't care how. But all these answers are going to give you information about how you can best serve that job. And sometimes it'll immediately sprite is. Sometimes you also have this conversation and say, You know what, I'm not the person for this. I know who the person is. Let me introduce you to if you're giving a package price, which I would recommend. Set this set the specs for say, a minimum deliverable. You say, Okay, it's going to be hundred 80 pages. It's going to have X amount of images that I will edit. It's going to have this much texts that you provide. This much texts that I provide. The fee is going to be x $30,000, $40,000. Here's what happens when we go over we go outside of those specs. It's going to be for every extra page, it's going to be another 500 bucks for every additional feature. It's going to be this much if you need more text, that's going to be billed hourly. If you need more image editing, that's going to be billed hourly. Or by image. Everything you can think of quoted in ahead of time. Try to keep the contract reasonably compact. I mean, this can be achieved in 23 pages. Have a general terms and conditions section that protects you in terms of liability. If content that's provided to you isn't legally in the clear, you can't be on the hook for that. If you provide something. The client needs to also check with their legal department that it doesn't cause them any trouble. I would strongly strongly urge you for this job and any other job to work with a lawyer, even for a little bit for a few hours and invest in a decent terms and conditions addendum to your contract, maybe work up a standard contract. It will save you so much heartache. Also, look into liability insurance for your business. It's in cost a whole lot. And he's a mind is worth something. Some designers used to. I don't know to what degree they still do. Take a markup on printing. They broke her the printing. They pay for the printing and then they charged clouds and markup. I have never done that because it puts huge amount of risk on your shoulders. If your client, for some reason or other, will not or cannot pay you because you're still going to be on the hook to the printer. And I've seen colleagues get into D, trouble having to cover bills for the printer when the client abscond. But as you're doing the intake conversation with the client and as you're working on your contract, ask who gets to approve the book? Because sometimes you'll deal with a marketing manager or Communications VP or somebody like that, trying to get a sense of what the approval process is going to be like. Ask if they've done book projects in the past or how complex projects like this usually get approved. Long it takes how many people have to look at things. If everybody who has final approval is going to be involved all along the way, or if it's sort of going up a ladder to an eventual big boss person who gets to say yay or nay. Then factor that into your pricing estimate and involve the client and say, what's been the best way of navigating this process for you in the past. What's yield at the best results? Because every one of these things is a chance to learn something that you can apply for the rest of your career. So don't let go of that opportunity to get information, to learn how other people do this thing that you do. As you make your first presentation. The best advice I can give you is to give real range. A lot of times what I see, especially with younger professionals, is that they present three things that are very, very similar. I wouldn't present more than that, but that's also part of the scoping conversation as we set up the contract, is how many different designs do they expect to see and what do they expect to see for each direction? I will usually say each direction has one cover, two or three sample spreads, maybe Table of Contents, something representative that lets them get a feel, but just something to find. It's just a range finding exercise. You specify it so that nobody is surprised at any point other than by your obvious brilliance. Obviously. As you set up your contract, make sure that you have Hayman benchmarks. I've found it very tempting to the past, just to say, OK, half up front, half when the book is delivered. Or a third one, the book is a third for signing. A third one, it goes to print and the third one is deliberate. I now make a lot of little benchmarks. It's not a sexy and satisfying as getting a big check at the end. But things go wrong. Things go wrong that have nothing to do with you, me or them or the part of the project. Sometimes there is, say, a global pandemic. Something may happen in another part of your client's company that has nothing to do with what you're doing. And suddenly the book is delayed for a year or two years. Sometimes the book gets canceled. And I've had kill fees and my contract always, but I've had kill fees that were OK. Half up front. And if I show, you know, after I've shown you the first round are the first two rounds, that half is mine no matter what happens. But then sometimes I've worked to the 97% mark and then something happens and they're like, Yeah, we're just not doing it now. Then theoretically I forfeited the rest of my fee despite the fact that I've done 97% of the work. So I wouldn't recommend it. I do it myself. Lots of little benchmarks. And every time I get to one of the benchmarks, I get paid for that part of it. Just to take drama out of the process and to mitigate risks of things that are beyond your control and that are often also beyond your immediate client's control. Because I don't think people are out to screw each other. Stuff happens and you just have to set up things in a way that make disasters and also disastrous. So again, I would talk to a lawyer about it. I would also talk to peers and colleagues about it. I think we all do ourselves a great disservice and not talking about the nuts and bolts of our business. What rates do we charge? How do we charge it? Are there things that have worked particularly well in one in one contract? Are there things that have become problematic that were in the contract that had to be taken up. Avoid work for hire contracts at all costs because it signs over all your rights. Always retain the right to promote your project, but you get to photograph your project. You got to put it on your website and your portfolio in whatever form that may take. Always negotiate for lots of sample copies. I get 200 sample copies of every book that I author. I usually get a little stash of books that I do for clients. Tends to be an easy yes as you negotiate. And this is how you get future work. And it's how you get to promote yourself. You always want to have a nice little stash on hand so you don't have to treat each one like precious, precious gold. You have to decide every time or is this person really worthy of the sample? You want to have enough where you can go like, Oh my God, I thought you'd like this book here. These are all the little things we can talk about. If you're so inclined, ask me questions here on the site, and I'm happy to talk about all of that in detail. I also do consultations with people if you want to talk privately. I'm happy to do that. Thank you so much for going on this journey with me and for investing your care in this process, and for caring about books. The best. I feel lucky that I got to design them. I'm so happy that you're excited about designing them. I'm so glad we got to do this together. Rock on with what you're doing and I'll see you out there.