Transcripts
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.