Today’s session was two talks from publishing professionals. One from Egmont and the other a UCLan MA Publishing graduate now working as an editor at Voyager, an imprint of Harper Collins specialising in sci-fi and fantasy. The lesson I took from this is the nature of publishing in terms of how departments talk to one… Continue reading The Publishing World According to it’s Practitioners
This week we had a sick lecturer so the design tasks had to be undertaken alone in solace. This in itself was a challenge. I enjoy the design process but I find it difficult and time consuming to implement. This has made me think long and hard about the path I wish to pursue upon… Continue reading Catching up in Solace
This week’s session ranks as by far the best of all the sessions undertaken so far. We welcomed book design legend and seemingly never out of work Jamie Keenan and he presented a design masterclass which amounted to an exercise in simplicity conducted via an exercise in playing around with paper and glue. We had… Continue reading Special Guest Star Jamie Keenan
This week continued the theme of interior layout design whilst also introducing typesetting, a whole other side of this module about which I feel a great deal more confident than cover design, more than likely because of a greater focus on words than just pictures and layout alone. This was a much more holistic or… Continue reading The Shape of Things to Come: Interior Design Part II
This week I experimented with inserting shapes/polygons into an InDesign document, and also looking at how to insert text within shapes/polygons. It was simpler than I had initially imagined, the challenge being one of taste and design skill, i.e. to make the inserted shapes fit tastefully within the text. The key here is aesthetics. The… Continue reading The Shape of Things to Come: Interior Design Part I
This week in a brilliant session I completed my first attempt at producing a draft of something resembling a book cover. The process of creating the cover image came relatively easily to me. I decided to assume that this fictional author was a well known one and that it therefore would be best to feature… Continue reading Cover Me Up, There’s a Draft
This week was a continuation of last week as we learned more about setting up a grid, inserting text and images and suchlike. This repetition is important as much of the mastery of InDesign comes down to doing things over and over again, eventually with things such as mouse actions and keyboard shortcuts eventually sticking… Continue reading Covering Covers II
This week’s lecture was all about practical book design. I feel that I have a significant head start in this area because InDesign is not so different from an HTML editing client and I have plenty of experience on that front. Once I learned the controls setting up a book grid was simple. The most… Continue reading Off the Grid
Fonts. Who knew that there was so much to fonts? Having previously worked with fonts a little in web design, and also having done a little desktop publishing in the heady old days of the best family of computers ever made, the Commodore Amiga, long before the current era of the digital native, I am well… Continue reading The Font of all Knowledge
Yesterday’s design lecture dealt with all things to do with covering wise. We had a brief recap of the design process related to the cover of The Art of Being Normal, and how the designer produced the final cover (this incidentally convinced to buy the book in class). It was fascinating to see the designs… Continue reading Covering Covers
Harry Potter's Wilderness Years 