Category: Work

Am I in the wrong business?

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dirty hands

I just spent something like three blissful hours doing my best to break a new module in Nextbook.org’s content management system, and then writing up a list of bugs and change requests. (The most rewarding was when I managed to elicit an SQL syntax error—all hail the mighty apostrophe!) This is perhaps the most fun thing I’ve done at my job all year.

I used to love doing this . . . stuff—what would you call it? QA?—at Poets.org (where it was a major part of my job), I once sent an unsolicited website critique to my friends at jubilat (I also sent an unsolicited critique of some typographic aspects the magazine, which garnered an “Okay, if you know so much, you fix it, smartass,” though much more kindly, of course), and I frequently submit bug reports to other sites that I visit. I haven’t gotten to really nitpick over any websites in recent years, though, and I miss it.

Anybody need a beta tester?

Photo: dirty hands by O Pish Posh / Shauna R; some rights reserved.

Mr. Sunshine

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Nextbook.org home page, October 8, 2007: Shalom Auslander

I was sick of posting the same two grumpy headshots of Shalom Auslander, who has a column on Nextbook.org and whom we feature pretty often, so I asked the valiant Aaron Artessa, who made such a lovely silk purse out of the sow’s-ear photos I sent him of Leonard Michaels, to draw us a grumpy illustration to accompany a podcast about Auslander’s new book, The Foreskin’s Lament. I love the little black rain cloud, which of course makes me think of Pooh. You know—wrath of God, Pooh, same thing.

If you don’t understand why Auslander has a rain cloud over his head, go listen to our podcast (where you can also see the illustration somewhat bigger) or watch the trailer for his book.

Nose Job

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Nextbook.org home page, September 19, 2007

Vanessa Davis did this illustration for us months ago, and then the story got pushed to November for some reason. But then today’s story wasn’t ready in time, so at the last minute, the editors swapped this one in. I’m so glad it’s finally up!

I really liked the preliminary sketch for this and couldn’t imagine how the final illustration would improve on it. Well, I guess I’m just not very imaginative, because it improved a lot. You can see the complete piece on the story page. It’ll probably get knocked out of the main home page slot tomorrow, unfortunately.

(I know it seems like it’s all Vanessa Davis, all the time around here, but really, I am commissioning work from other artists.)

Creepaway Camp

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Nextbook.org home page: July 30, 2007: summer camp

Back when I was first asking y’all about how you find illustrators, I stumbled across illoz.com, a cool portfolio site with some handy art direction tools built in. I signed up, and since then I’ve made a lot of folders in my illoz account, with lots of samples by people whose work I like. But not until two weeks ago did I find an artist whose work I thought would be the perfect match for a specific story.

story illustrator
is about a girl at camp, mostly takes place in woods draws a lot of girls in woods
is creepy can draw very creepily

I confess that I didn’t contact Sam Weber using the lovingly designed art direction interface on illoz.com, though it certainly sounds nice—

An art director account at illoz gives you the ability to initiate project assignments with any illoz portfolio owner. Sketches can be viewed here at the site, then commented on and approved. After that, final art can be downloaded directly from a portfolio owner’s personal area. The job can go from start to finish, right here at illoz.

I think the thing is, I’m a socially challenged geek to begin with, and I’d always rather contact someone through a structured form than by phone or e-mail, so I try to fight that tendency by occasionally picking up the phone, instead. Not that I picked up the phone in this case, either. But I did write a long, no doubt overly detailed e-mail directly to Sam, mentioning that I’d found him on illoz. And he wrote back! And he accepted the job! And he did it very quickly! And I love it! And it’s on our home page until tomorrow morning, and in the story indefinitely!

So, that’s my illoz success story.

The story Sam illustrated, incidentally, is by my colleague Ellen, and I think it’s really good. You should read it if you’re, you know, one of the few designer-types who knows how to read.

Measuring the marigolds

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Inchworm

Here’s another thing I looked up for the dozenth time that I thought you, too, might want not to have to look up. I use picas as the default unit in InDesign because I find them far more useful than inches when working with mostly type. But I wanted to tell someone how big an image needed to be, and I wanted to do it in inches, and math is hard!, soooo . . . I knew there was some way to get the units of measurement shown in the control palette to change on the fly, but I couldn’t remember the keyboard command.

The answer, per InDesign Secrets, is CMD+OPT+SHIFT+U on the Mac, or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+U on Windows. Keep hitting that combo until the palette cycles through to the unit you want.

While trying to find this shortcut, I also came across a CreativePro article, one of whose tips I’d never seen before: InDesign How-To: Six Small Things, Six Big Results. The third, “Sneaky access to options,” was new to me and seems like it’d be useful.

Bonus non-InDesign discovery: Palette Generator: Automagically create a harmonious color palette from a photograph (via The Paper Pony).

Have you looked anything up lately? Do tell.

Photo: Inchworm on the rim of my cup… by seahorse_ / melanie; was licensed CC-by-nc 2.0 on 7/13/07, but the photographer has subsequently changed the license to copyright.

The lazy days of summer

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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.

How do you find out about design-related stuff?

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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

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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.