Publicious: Publishing Tech & Tools

One of the fringe benefits of a career in publishing tech is that once in a while you get to use your DTP skills to amaze your friends and family. The other main benefit is the catered meeting leftovers at work (mmmm, corporate brownies).

Granted, it’s not as practical as a plumber who can fix anything that leaks, or a mechanic who can get your car started. But when the iPhoto red eye tool just won’t cut it, I’m your guy. The 8 year old is out of graph paper? No problem, young man. What size, color and weight would you like your grid lines to be? While we’re at it, want to make a picture of the cats fighting with lightsabers? Of course you do.

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Tonight was the 10th anniversary of the last episode of Seinfeld (and coincidentally, the last call for Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra). I always got a kick out seeing the Mac in the background of Seinfeld’s apartment, and how he silently “upgraded” each year to Apple’s latest and greatest. In the final season, Jerry even had one of those crazy 20th Anniversary Macs.

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Sorry for the long dry spell. Real life and real work have taken all my time this past week. I promise it’s gonna start raining fresh content here, within the next 24 hours. Get your umbrella ready. I have 8 posts in draft right now, plus another storm of InDesign templating wisdom from Cinnamon is coming in from Chicago. Hang in there.

During the last year I’ve moved three times at work, and each time I’ve tried to shed some of the sticky detritus of my career in publishing. It’s cube crap, unused in years, but somehow always avoiding the trash bin. Outdated manuals, mystery dongles, piles of spec guide binders, a small moose made of binder clips. Rule of thumb: if you have more loupes than eyes, it’s time to pare down.

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After a few night’s decent sleep, I am now fully recovered from l’affaire autosave. Let us never speak of it again. Time to jump back in the blogfire with both feet. This time the topic is something that’s just pure fun. It’s my new favorite site/application/addiction, and it’s called FontStruct.

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A Lament

Before you read this post, know o faithful reader, that it is but an shadow of a longer, greater, wittier post that was lost in a horrible instant when a flaky trackpad conspired with WordPress autosave to destroy five hours of writing and editing. Would you believe me if I told you it was the best, funniest thing I’d ever written for this blog? Only the good die young. But why, why did it have to be that post?

In concrete terms, my sticky trackpad jump scrolled to select the entire post instead of one line I wanted, and in that exact moment, as I was pressing the delete key, WordPress autosaved the draft, obliterating everything I’d written. No undo. No back-up. Breathtaking. Horror. Finality. Despair. Gone. All gone. Deep breath. Rueful laugh. Writers keep writing. And now we rise from the ashes to give you…

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Just updated the PDF of the Non-Designer’s Design Checklist to make it a little less crude in case you might actually want to keep it for reference.

About a dozen years ago, as I embarked upon my journey into the realm of publishing, I bought a book called The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. I’m pretty sure it was recommended to me by the guy who taught my first Quark XPress class. I remember thinking it was a fine and fun book. It may have taught me just enough about design to be dangerous. I made up business cards, and took on a couple freelance jobs designing flyers and the like. Years later I had enough confidence to take a side gig designing newspaper ads. Not exactly the peak of the design profession, but it was fun to at least be the guy picking the fonts. I left that job after I’d made enough to buy a second family car, and then spent the better part of a decade forgetting everything I learned from the Non-Designer’s Design Book. So I was happy to stumble upon a copy of the brand new, 3rd edition a few weeks ago.

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I’m going to the next Boston InDesign User Group meeting.

Here are the details:

Authoring Interactive and Accessible PDFs with InDesign
Massachusetts College of Art
Thu, May 8, 2008, 6:00 PM

Some of the coolest things I saw all last year in the publishing realm were PDF/Flash mashups that had their genesis in InDesign. So I’m looking forward to this talk, and hoping to hear more about the integration of Flash and InDesign. If this sounds interesting to you, and you want to meet up, send me an e-mail.

Registration is required. So if you’re not already a member of the InDesign User Group, you need to sign up and register (both are free).

The colors of spring are starting to pop where I live. The forsythia are spewing pure 100y by the driveway. The birch are popping a crazy out-of-gamut green, something like L74a(65)b65, The magnolias are blooming default [paper] on Comm Ave. and even my grass is a greener shade of brown. So what better time than to play with the swatches palette in InDesign, and see how we can fill it up with cool colors.

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