EPUB3

"Publishers [will] start adding crappy JS to their books hoping it will make them “stand out”, “embrace the future”, “f--- goats” or whatever."

This is a few months old, which, in internet time means it was written around 1910. This article so sums up my feelings about EPUB3. On one hand it is great and supportive, on the other hand it makes what I do completely change in order to bend to the wills of publishers. It's a long article, but worth the read from The Digital Reader.

Swimming in the Steno Pool

"Swimming in the Steno Pool" by Lynn Peril is a book about the history and culture of Stenographers (Secretaries). This book was awesomely designed by Judith Stagnitto Abbate of Abbate Design with a very retro feeling, harkening the cultural height of stenography, the 50s-60s.

I really wish font-embedding worked better right now. Currently there are few options. One in particular is to embed fonts through InDesign during export. Sounds pretty swell, especially when you (only ever) view the book in Adobe Digital Editions (funny how that works...). However, InDesign creates an encryption file for the fonts and this prevents the book from being valid by EPUB standards. Delete the file, you say? Well sure, but you run the risk of your fonts not functioning at all. If you use OpenType fonts that don't have any security built in, your embedded font will work just fine (except on devices that use their own system fonts, like, almost all of them...) There is some code to specify font files for the book, but again, unless the typeface is OpenType and lucky, it may not hold.

So what to do when there are some pretty cool elements that are font-based? Why, Graphicize™ (start branding early!) them!  All of the chapter opening numbers are graphics. I felt that if those were lost it would change the whole feel of the book so I worked around what I could.

When you read the text, you'll notice there are asides, articles placed within the main text, that needed to be visually separated. This is done very well in the printed text and I wanted to replicate that best I could. But how to accomplish this for all platforms when Kindle doesn't hold background tints! Well, kiddos, that's why there are actually two versions of this book available to download. One optimized for Kindle, one for everything else. In the Kindle version the articles are separated using graphic lines, for everything else there is a background tint to define the text. This was....well....much more work than I originally schemed it to be, but it looks soooooooo good! (Strong Bad, anyone?)

In a nutshell, this book was a very fun puzzle to work on. It is also a really interesting book that made it VERY difficult not to read during conversion (some books are, ahem, really easy to not read while working). I highly recommend this one as an entertaining summer read. Maybe give it a go to really get into the spirit before Mad Men season! It was also recently reviewed by BUST magazine!

Buy "Swimming in the Steno Pool" by Lynn Peril here on Amazon from W. W. Norton & Company

OR get it for iBooks or Nook!

Remember: Unless a book is public domain, you must legally obtain any copy. In other words: just buy it, it's an inexpensive eBook.

The Influencing Machine: A Comic eBook

Available in eBook stores now is "The Influencing Machine" By Brooke Gladstone from NPR and illustrator Josh Neufeld. This book was a bit of a doozy. It's a comic book, with hardly ANY flowing text. We've optimized it for Kindle DX and other large-screen readers because of its graphic nature. This was quite the experiment. How to get decent images so they're legible? Do we sacrifice quality to keep file size down? ALSO I decided to build this one in Indesign CS5.5, recently released and as of that point untested by me. Yeah. Apparently the challenge of making a comic book for readers wasn't quite enough, I needed to throw in a new program version. I will say that I'm happy with how "The Influencing Machine" came out. I would REALLY like to get the file size down next time since this one is about 6 times larger than most eBooks.

I also promise to try and make these posts more fun to read and less nerd-talk. Well...I promise to think about trying.

Buy "The Influencing Machine" by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld from W. W. Norton & Company at Amazon!

Remember: Unless a book is public domain, you must legally obtain any copy. In other words: just buy it, it's an inexpensive eBook.

The Story of Stuff

Picture 4, originally uploaded by designoptics.

Ever wonder where your stuff comes from? This flash movie created by Free Range Studios is really interesting and informative. I got the opportunity to visit Free Range last year and see what they're about (think sustainable development + graphic design) and was very very impressed so I was excited to find that they were the ones behind this terrific piece. Sit down for 20 minutes and get educated!

Joe the Dreamer

Picture 2, originally uploaded by designoptics.

Another in the series of posts where I quickly catch up and write about the backstock of websites and artists that I enjoy is Joe the Dreamer. A fantastic artist all around. The website is super fun to pass the time with. Go there and look around!

ColourLovers

Picture 1, originally uploaded by designoptics.

This is a site I frequent to get inspiration for color selection! It's user-supplied so there is a wide variety of opinions for color choice on specific topics. It's great for borrowing an entire color scheme or just getting out of the color rut that we all can be in. You can download pallets for specific use in design programs but it also provides the HEX codes and RGB configurations. Grade A Resource!