June 2009 – India, Ink.

Indexigning

June 11, 2009 India3 Comments

Via e-mail, Lars R. asks, “Would you consider doing a write-up on your blog on the production of indices and how indexing relates to the design process as a whole?”

Some topics I’m interested in include

– The usefulness of InDesign’s indexing feature (as opposed to third party programmes if they exist, or simply manually typing in numbers)
– The practicalities of the designer being involved with the nitty gritty versus any sort of indexing specialist working independently)
– At which stage in the production process indexing begins and ends
– Differences between independent/inhouse publishers and large commercial affairs
– Does the designer generally have any input to level of detail, extent etc, or is it exclusively a case of matter having priority over form? How does the index influence castoff?

Continue reading “Indexigning” →

“artistic standard designs, fit for a palace”

June 10, 2009April 26, 2010 India3 Comments

Jonathan McNicol clearly does not have enough to do. To stay out of trouble, he’s started typesetting a free Greybean edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, pages of which he expects to be posting daily until some time in October.

This kind of fits in with something Margaret, Shelby, and I were talking about doing last year. Maybe we should get off our butts and do that . . .

Font Consultant to the Stars Star Trek

June 10, 2009April 26, 2010 India2 Comments

My former colleague Lawrence Levi, of Looker and The Breadline, reports that “the new Star Trek movie‘s final credit . . . is for FONT CONSULTANT. Yup. He’s Richard Massey, . . . who was part of the initial design team of Cabinet magazine.” Lawrence then directs our attention to “an outraged design blogger, the only person who seems to have noticed this quirky credit”: Blogging via Typewriter.

I know nothing whatsoever about the man, but it’s funny if it’s true.

Nextbook’s swank new pad

June 9, 2009April 26, 2010 India2 Comments

My erstwhile coworkers have been toiling their little hearts out for months, rethinking and rebuilding Nextbook’s online magazine, the former Nextbook.org. The shiny new publication, which launched today, is called Tablet, and it was designed by Prem Krishnamurthy and Rob Giampietro. Tablet‘s Liel Leibovitz has posted a little slideshow in which the designers talk about what they did: Our New Look.

The new site has a WordPress backend (the old one ran on some weird Perl CMS), which the firm Hard Candy Shell set up and filled with all the previous magazine’s content.

Go visit, and tell them what you think of the new digs. If you don’t know what the old site looked like, you can find some screenshots in my Flickr collection.

(I made no contribution to the redesign myself, having [mostly] resigned from my post in January so that I could concentrate on school. The fabulous Abigail Miller, assistant art director, held the fort on her own all spring, while Alana Newhouse, editor in chief, dealt with the designers and developers directly. Nextbook’s new art director, as of about three weeks ago, is the mighty Len Small.)