The Blog
Seems Like Old Times … Not Really
Has it really been 15 years since I last posted to the blog? I mean, almost to the day! I stopped posting to this blog back then because I’d run out of new things to say about book design, making books, and freelancing. It just felt like I was stretching beyond any...
How to Win When Self-Publishing Your Book—November 17th, 2009
Maybe my perspective as a book designer skews my vision but I cannot imagine a scenario in which a self-publisher—someone seeking to publish a book he or she has written—would want anything but first-rate, professional book design and production. The way I see it,...
I Get Letters … and Other Communiqués—October 21st, 2009
I found your webpage while looking at some information on typesetterforum.com. I had a friend mention freelance typesetting as a possibility for work. I am currently out of school, with no education focused on design; however, I am a bit of a photographer and have...
All About the Work—October 4th, 2009
I watched a documentary the other night about Frank Gehry, the architect. Something he said struck me, though, I confess, evidently not so much that I can remember just what word-for-word. I recall Mr. Gehry speaking of waiting for the one piece of work that would...
Stream of Consciousness: From Luddism to Deer to E-Books—September 30th, 2009
The first thing I got involved in this morning was reading a rather dimwitted statement of one man’s feeling that social media are pretty much useless. He had posted on a forum about publishing—himself a small publisher, I gather—sounding as if he rejected social...
Another Anniversary Approaches—September 24th, 2009
The twenty year mark from when I bought my first Macintosh computer in November of 1989, a IIx, approaches. Before that, from 1985 on, I had been an Apple Computer fan, but I belonged to the family of Apple II users—at first on a IIe and then a IIgs. At that point all...
The Other Kind of Client—September 22nd, 2009
Opposite the wide-open approach adopted by one client, as I described last time, is the fully hands-on manner of another of my current clients. This can, and did, work as well as the first case. While the confidence of a client to proceed with a design exactly as I...
A New Book Interior—September 14th, 2009
Some projects make for great fun. At the moment, I find myself in one of my best runs ever for that kind of work. First came a book interior design and layout with a new client, a small college press. As I usually do with a new client, one of my chief aims was to see...
Mercury Retrograde—September 7th, 2009
This may sound like just so much superstition to some. And coincidence. Or perhaps “coincidence” is all many of us can think to call it when a number of similar events occur in the same time period. Anyway, here’s the tale … As best as I can remember, a number of...