Category: Work

Now, that's the kind of author I like

India8 Comments

An editor just delivered to me a Starbucks gift card from the author of a book I haven’t even started working on yet. The author was late in returning the copyedited manuscript (or something—according to the schedule I have, nothing’s due until January) and actually felt guilty, knowing that combined with the holidays, this might send a cascade of hardship through the production department.

Awww.

Does Starbucks have sandwiches? (Being a tea drinker, I never go in there.) I could really use a sandwich right now.

"India, Pixels" doesn't have much of a ring to it, sadly.

India6 Comments

Okay, so, you know how I’m always talking about pretty things you can make out of dead trees? Well, how would you feel if I kind of maybe mixed that up with some stuff about the pretty things you can make out of living, blinking pixels? Because as of January 15, 2007, I’ll no longer be designing book interiors full-time. Nope, instead, I’m switching gears—again!—to go manage this Web site. I’ll also be doing a bit of print-related stuff there, and, because I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to say “No,” I’ll probably continue doing freelance work on print publications; but overall you should see a shift on this blog from print-related verbose rambling to Web-related verbose rambling. It’ll still be book-related, because I’ll be working at a literary organization with book right there in the name, but the nerdy parts may sound different.

(For those of you who’re amused by how-did-I-get-here stories, this latest transition was brought to you by two friends and former coworkers from the Academy of American Poets, who now work at Nextbook. There was some stuff that needed doing, and they thought I’d be a good person to come do it. There was lunch; there was tea; there was no interview-for-which- I-had-to-wear-grown-up-shoes. I feel guilty about leaving my current sweet gig so soon—I like it just fine and had intended to stay there at least five years—you know, until I was fully vested in the 401K—but the new gig is even sweeter, and I have friends and admired colleagues there already, and I dearly hope that I will like it even finer.)

So, if you have any outstanding questions about what it’s like to design book guts in house for a mainstream publisher, now’s your chance! Ask me before I forget everything!

And if you have any observations about Nextbook.org (which is about to be relaunched, with a redesign that I’ve had nothing to do with—exciting!), feel free to shoot them my way, either in comments or by e-mail. It’s been more than five years since I was responsible for a big-ass Web project, and it really would help me get up to speed with this new job to hear what some of you think of the existing site. I have my own vague opinions about it, and I’ve yet to thoroughly examine the redesign that’s still under wraps. But I don’t have any sense (much less hard data) yet of who visits the site, how they use it, and what they think of it. I’d love to hear your impressions, whether you’ve ever visited it before reading this post or not.

In other news, I’m on vacation. Hello, London! Any book nerds here? And Tuesday: Paris!

Deeee-luxe.

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Here is a short-run signed gift edition whose case stamp (right foreground) I got to design (I did the interior, too; not worth showing).

OSC Gift Edition

The vermilion endsheets, as you can see, are the best part. The headbands have yellow and white stripes. The red pigment on the title is deeper and more lacquerlike than it looks in the photo.

It’s not at all inspired, I’m afraid, but the author said he’s happy with it, and that’s what counts, right? The jacket design for the non-gift edition (left) is by Jamie Stafford-Hill (the stamped one has a clear acetate dust jacket); I don’t remember who did the illustration. I originally tried to make a simplified version of the whole illustration into a two-color stamp, but it just didn’t look good. So after too many days of fiddling around in Photoshop, I finally went with just the gold dome.

The result won’t even make it into the Guild of Book Workers Best of Late November awards. Sigh.

WWLWHD? What would you have done?

How did I get here?!?

India17 Comments

A long time ago, in a comment thread at his own blog, Derek asked how I landed in book design, despite my not having any formal training in design.

My initial response was, “Certainly! My pleasure! Pull up a chair.

“I was born in a one-room log cabin . . .”

But then I started actually trying to explain it, and the explanation got way too long—which comes as a huge surprise, I know, since I’m usually so concise, using just a few well-chosen simple declarative sentences.

So I’ve sat on the draft for three months now, and it’s still ridiculously long and overly detailed, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. Because (1) that’s the way my brain works; blame my >32 AQ, and (2) real lives are messy. When they write the third-grade-reading-level biography of me, it’ll probably read something like,

India was born in New York City. Her mother was an extremely famous artist. Her father worked in advertising and marketing. She became a very famous book designer, earning quadrillions of dollars. Then she won the first Nobel Peace Prize for Book Design. When she died, she had ninety-two cats. The end.

But in reality, there’s no straight line; it wiggles and blurs all over the place. I was one of those kids—or is it all of them?—who hated being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only knew that I didn’t want to be an artist and didn’t want to work in advertising. But besides that, I had no clue.

So, let’s start a little later.
Continue reading “How did I get here?!?” →

Why H. and I make a good team

India2 Comments

We tend to work in pairs at my company, and I’m paired with H., whose job is basically identical to mine despite a difference in our titles (I have no idea why I’m “senior” to her). You’ve seen me refer to her as my “teammate” here. We don’t work on projects together, but we do commiserate and collude; sometimes we bounce ideas off each other; and when one of us is out of the office, the other holds the fort and deals with emergencies.

Over the years, somehow, despite being kind of an acquired taste, I’ve tended to get along with most of my colleagues, and it’s a source of great pride and delight to me that I’m still friends with, for example, people I worked with in a bookstore, making minimum wage, on the opposite coast, fifteen years ago. Most of my friends are former coworkers, in fact, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a lousy freelancer: I just get lonely. And then I go online. And that’s the end of my workday.

But although I can get along with most people in small-to-moderate doses, it’s not everyone whom I can really adore, you know? So I feel very lucky that my current teammate is the kind of person who posts signs like this when she’s taking a vacation day:

Why I Like H.

Also, she has snakes. [Heart]

May I take your order?

India5 Comments

As promised, here’s a sample of how I annotate a design for the compositor. These are actual specs for an actual book that was just typeset. I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I know that it hit castoff on the first try, which is miraculous given that the book in question is an anthology and the manuscript was all tear sheet. I did not have an electronic manuscript for this book, so my samples are typeset from a disturbing amalgam of Flatland and actual snippets of text from the book, as typed (with four fingers!) by me.

I’m not presenting this as an example of fabulous design; I go back and forth between thinking it’s handsome and finding it vile. Rather, it’s a fair example of a pain-in-the-ass document structure: many of the pieces in the anthology have odd one-off design elements. One has its own dedication, one has its own credit line, one is a series of poems, one has two kinds of space break, . . . And it’s volume one of I don’t know how many, so the next in the series will probably require even more styles that get used for only one or two pieces.
Continue reading “May I take your order?” →

What Happens When

India11 Comments

I don’t have a good internal sense of time. I tend not to know what day it is, can’t guess the hour with any accuracy, forget to eat lunch until 3 p.m., often let my tea steep for far too long, never leave the office at 5:00 unless I have to be somewhere else (in which case I’m typically late), stay up til 1:00 almost every night even if I’m having to hold my eyelids up with toothpicks, and tend to underestimate how long it will take me to do things. I try to counter this deficiency by setting my watch and all the clocks in my house at least five minutes fast, always setting a timer when I make tea at home, and making vigorous use of the alarms in Entourage and Google Calendar.

At my last two jobs, the problem was compounded by the fact that there were no schedules—or, at least, none that were posted or that anybody paid attention to. At the latter place in particular, the work plan was a mystery served with warm enigma glaze and an invisible cherry on top. I started to write you a timeline for a typical day, but then I thought I might get arrested and put in one of the CIA’s secret—but empty, honest!—prisons. Such opacity and evasion as I and my fellow “production artists” witnessed when trying to figure out what was really due when could only mean that our schedule was a matter of national security, and that we were being left out of the loop for our own protection.

So instead, I will focus on the positive, which is that I now work in a place where the schedules are explicit, universally distributed, and continually updated. I usually receive the necessary piles of manuscript or proofs well in advance of their due dates, and I even have time to file papers, eat lunch outside the building, study my predecessors’ work, chat by the water cooler, and once in a while turn things in before they’re due. Crazy.

So, what’s on these magnificent schedules? Here’s the typical order of operations for designing a book interior, as seen from my (heptagonal!) office:
Continue reading “What Happens When” →

What are your “desert island” layout tools?

India2 Comments

On Tuesday I submitted the following modest list of software requests to IT:

  • Quicksilver (free)
    Application launcher and much, much more! I know it still claims to be beta, but I’ve used almost every version since it was released, with no problems.

  • TextWrangler (free)
    Text editor

  • PrintWindow Standard (free)
    Prints Finder windows

  • Badia FullMeasure XT ($79.99)
    Multifunction Quark XTension that seems to do everything the constellation of tools [for Quark 4, mostly pirated] I used to have accomplished

  • Editor’s Toolkit Plus ($69.95)
    Word macro set for scrubbing manuscripts

  • India Ink ($15)
    Photoshop plugin for mucking with halftones

  • MS Office 2004 ($?)
    Not at all urgent, but for the record, the current version has much better style sheet handling than Word X. I’m probably one of two people in the building who uses style sheets in Word, but I’m just saying, is all.

  • Firefox (free)
    Current version (1.5; I’m still on 1.0.7)

Continue reading “What are your “desert island” layout tools?” →

Trust no one.

India16 Comments

On Thursday afternoon, the day Mr. Mac Tech was supposed to come upgrade my computer, I made some backups. I felt kind of silly doing it, but I justified my paranoia by telling myself I’d need copies of some of my files for Friday, when I’d be working on someone else’s computer. And you never know which book someone will ask you an urgent question about, so I sorted my job folders by date and backed up all the ones that had been modified since the day I started. I also backed up my Firefox settings, address book, Entourage database, and a bunch of other miscellaneous crap. Three full CDs. And then I printed out a file listing for each and stuck them in my desk drawer. To the desktop I downloaded the installers for Quicksilver, TextWrangler, and Print Window.

You can see where this is going, I’ll bet.
Continue reading “Trust no one.” →

Tomorrow!

India9 Comments

I get! The new! Disk! Image!

The job I started at the end of May is my first at a Large Corporation, so it’s my first time dealing with an IT department and a locked-down applications folder.

When I arrived here and saw my lush silver G5 tower and the slim 19-inch Apple Cinema monitor—not to mention the window and the door and the drafting table—I was thrilled. Jobs at places that have money can be good!

When I turned the computer on and discovered that it was loaded up with cutting-edge software such as OS 10.2.8 (Jaguar—that’s two cats ago, for those of you not using Macs), Quark XPress 6.1, Illustrator 10, Photoshop 7, and Acrobat 6.0.1, however, I was, let’s say, less thrilled.

Now, I love Mac OS X, but I love it in the current version, and I love it My Way—with a constantly adjusted array of little helper applications and custom settings. Call it a legacy of my years of power-using Windows, if you disapprove. So when I found that the application folder was locked so that I couldn’t install Quicksilver, which would have made up for the most annoying deficiencies of Jaguar’s primitive Finder, nor such useful tools as TextWrangler and PrintWindow, I was, mmm, pissed.

But I’ve watched The IT Crowd; I know you can’t just call the guys in the basement and say, “Fix my computer!” Because first they’ll let the phone ring forty-five times, then they’ll ask you to turn your computer off and on again, and then they’ll have madcap adventures—while still failing to fix your computer. These things have to be finessed.
Continue reading “Tomorrow!” →