Year: 2007

Quantity & Quality

India9 Comments

Beer Advent Calendar

I was just reading Nomi Altabef’s report on the How conference was was struck by this sentence—

The first session we attended was a witty walk through the work process of famed book designer Chip Kidd, who is known for churning out almost one book cover a week in his post at Knopf publishing house.

Um, I don’t do covers, but is that volume unusual? Or is it just unusual for a designer of Chip Kidd’s seniority? Because I would have thought that a full-time book jacket designer would be required to do rather more than one book a week.

And anyway, I don’t think “churning out almost one book cover a week” is what Chip Kidd is known for. What he’s known for is the quality of many of those covers.

Photo: New Advent Calendar by crouchingbadger / Ben; some rights reserved.

The lazy days of summer

IndiaLeave a comment

Nextbook.org home page, July 2, 2007: Beach

I am so lazy that even though I knew for months that today’s story was in the works, and that the editors kind of wanted an illustration, I didn’t ever get around to commissioning one. Well, also, in my defense, (a) I rarely know what the podcasts are really about before they’re posted—the final edit wasn’t ready for today’s until after noon—and (b) there was talk of taking photographs of the kids who were in the podcast, and I thought I could do something with those. What we ended up with was headshots, though—I ran them inside the story, but they’re not very useful for the home page. Oh, well.

So all I knew was that it would be kind of a “What should kids read this summer?” piece. And I had a vague recollection of some beach scenes on Vanessa Davis’s awesome site, Spaniel Rage, so I dug around until I found the one I was thinking of. I’d been talking with Vanessa since March about various things: first, a three-page bat mitzvah comic from 2005 that we want to reprint, and next, a commissioned illustration for an essay. But neither of those pieces has yet been scheduled to run, whereas this one was urgent, so today some of her older work (this is from 2004) went up first. Go figure.

It’ll be on the home page only through tomorrow morning; then we’ll be posting a different summer reading piece (for grownups), with some of my usual brilliant Flickr-mining on the front. Why didn’t I use this drawing to illustrate that piece, which will be up for two days, over the holiday? Duh. Poor planning.

See you in Seattle?

India4 Comments

Elephant Super Car Wash

Anybody going to TypeCon?

Despite saying last year that “I probably won’t go again,” and despite adding a mental “and especially to the one in Seattle,”* I just registered for, oops, the conference in Seattle. Because I realized that the way things are shaking out, otherwise I’ll end up not taking any summer vacation, and that’s just sad.

So I’ll drag myself out there for a week, see some friends, and maybe visit Vancouver. But also, because I’m already committed to flying across the country, staying in a hotel, and taking days off from work, this year I will be attending two full days of workshops (including “Bezier Curves for Cowards”!!), which I think will make the whole expedition much more fun and worthwhile.

And you?

Photo: elephant car wash by Jason Brackins; some rights reserved.

  • Lived there for a year. Didn’t like it.

How do you find out about design-related stuff?

India7 Comments

Advice

Book designer B., soon moving to New York, wrote today to inquire,

  1. How do you find design jobs?
  2. How do you find out about groups to join for discussing design, books, etc., and for going with to conferences/seminars/talks?
  3. What are your favorite sites for knowing when design-related things are happening?

I get asked this first question every few months, and perhaps you do, too. My answer is always something along the lines of—

I also sometimes recommend that people contact the Lynne Palmer agency, which is a headhunter specifically for book publishing. I’ve never gotten a job through them, except through the power of Magical Thinking—whenever I contact them, I get offered a job by someone else—but I do know that they get cool listings that you will not find online.

For the second and third questions, I have no idea. I skim so many design blogs’ RSS feeds that if something worthwhile is going on, I assume I’ll get wind of it. But maybe I’ve been missing out on all the fun. Are you all going to events and not inviting me?

Please discuss. Tips on entering design communities in other locales also very welcome.

Photo: Advice by NineFingers / dustinotariumatron; some rights reserved.

Two things I looked up today

India10 Comments

Power Tool Drag Race

  1. How to remove all hyperlinks in a Word document:
    Select all, then hit shift-command-F9 on the Mac (or shift-control-F9 on Windows).
  2. Which fonts can be safely deleted in OS X:
    Download the document “Best Practices for Managing Fonts in Mac OS X” from Extensis.com.

These are both things I’ve had to look up a dozen times before. Perhaps you have, too.

Looked anything up lately? Share!

Photo: Power Tool Drag Races by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid; some rights reserved.

Do you feel lucky?

India4 Comments

raffle ticket of the beast

If so, you might want to go buy a raffle ticket at Clusterflock, a scintillating group blog where I have occasionally been known to talk some trash. What’s being raffled?

iPhones, baby, iPhones.

You know you want one.

All the money received will be disbursed in the form of iPhones—with recipients to be chosen at random by celebrity random-name-chooser Jason Kottke—or will go to charity. So the more $20 tickets get bought, the more $499 phones get given away. Your chance of winning is therefore pretty close to 1 in 25, unless I’m really bad at math. (Which I am, by the way, so work it out for yourself; you may use a separate sheet of paper; I’ll wait. Correct me in the comments if I’m being totally stupid.) The no doubt exorbitant monthly service plan will, of course, be solely your problem.

The deadline for buying raffle tickets is noon CST (that’s Dallas time, y’all?) on June 26. Winners will be announced on June 27.

Photo: raffle ticket of the beast by squacco; some rights reserved.

What typefaces writers compose in, and why

India9 Comments

Daisy Wheel

Slate presents “My Favorite Font: Anne Fadiman, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal what font they compose in and why.” Some bits I appreciated:

I like Courier because it seems provisional—I can still change my mind—whereas Times New Roman and its analogues look like book faces, meaning that they feel nailed down and immovable. —Luc Sante

Most of my books have been set in Walbaum, which sounds like a chain store but is in fact an early-19th-century font designed by Justus Erich Walbaum, a German punchcutter whose luscious serifs may have been influenced by his early apprenticeship to a confectioner. —Anne Fadiman

Obsessing about fonts is a form of procrastination, so of course I have indulged in it ever since I graduated from a TRS-80 Model III to a Macintosh. —Caleb Crain

There’s a strong preference for Courier, which I happen to think is a good idea. Keeps the writer from getting to hung up on presentation. When I worked on the PEN literary journal, I’d format files in Courier for the staff, but in Times New Roman for the editor in chief. The book was then set in very small Adobe Caslon, and we’d find another round of typos on that version—you see different kinds of errors every time you change the typeface.

The default fonts in most of my non-layout applications are set to Georgia, Verdana, and Andale Mono. Yours?

(P.S. Man, remember daisy-wheel printers? I used to take mininaps between pages when I printed out my papers for school; each page took, like, five minutes, and I found the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat soothing.)

Photo: APL 10 by Paul Downey; some rights reserved.

Open-source bitmap-to-vector converter

India4 Comments

Hand with a quill pen

For those of you who don’t have Illustrator CS2 (or an ancient copy of Adobe Streamline), Cathi Stevenson points out that there’s an open-source program that will convert your bitmaps to vector art: Inkscape. It’s available for Linux, Windows 2000/2003/XP, and OS X (with X11 installed—this is on the Tiger disk somewhere).

I could have used this often at my last job, where I was stuck with Illustrator CS. Instead, I either e-mailed files to my personal account so I could convert them at home (if I had time) or traced them by hand (if I didn’t).

Has anybody tried Inkscape besides Cathi? I’ve downloaded it but haven’t got X11 set up yet.

Photo: Hand with a quill pen by Barbara Smith; some rights reserved.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]