Link to the InDesign CS5.5 Help PDF
Anna-Marie gave us this link in Design Geek for the online help PDFs for CS5.5
Continue reading →Category Archives: Book Design
No, No! to double-space and double-returns
What follows is an excerpt from my new release, Writing In InDesign Second Edition. ******************************** Typography determines reader reactions It goes far beyond your font choices—important as they are. This is the first and most important thing you must understand. You are not only trying to control or at least predict the reaction of your typical reader to your content. You are also working you make your book a comfortable, friendly, and familiar part of the life … Continue reading →
Column width: the key to comfortable reading
Be very careful with your column choices—especially in books. (It’s the main reason blogs and ebooks are so hard to read.) Your focus must be easy, comfortable readability. Generally, the asymmetrical (off-center) layouts with wide margins are good. Of course, you can go crazy and make things totally illegible. Modern style tends to be chaotic, splashy, and overly complex. But your innate taste and discretion should keep these tendencies in check. The problem, of course, is that taste … Continue reading →
Margins are more important than many think: Make the margins bigger
Make the margins bigger | I love typography, the typography and fonts blog. The I Love Typography blog is often over the top. Even as a typographer who has focused his career on type—both font design and page layout (the two parts of typography)— this blog is always fun, often beautiful, but commonly irrelevant to my daily work. On the other hand, the item discussed in the posting this morning is critical to excellence in typography. Margins … Continue reading →
Writing in InDesign is the only sensible choice for writers in the new paradigm of on-demand self-publishing
The greatly expanded and rewritten Writing In InDesign Second Edition has been released Buy it Now! Versions available so far Spiral-bound premium workbook $19.99 7×10 perfect-bound paperback $17.99 Kindle (with embedded fonts for Fire) $7.99 (Available in the Kindle Lending Library) What started as a relatively small update turned into a large scale revision when I began adapting my popular Writing In InDesign book to the responses and suggestions I received. I have been pleasantly surprised at all the people … Continue reading →
InDesign CS6 is all about promises for the future…
There are many exciting things to be found in the new version of InDesign. But if you read carefully, most of them are focused on an unspecified future where ePUB3 and HTML5 /CSS3 are the normal standards of ebook publishing. They are not now. In fact, there is no ePUB3 reader in common use at this time. In fact, there is really nothing out there for readers of ePUB books. I love CS6. It makes excellent ePUBs. … Continue reading →
Fonts are not typography, fonts are used to create typography
Before we can get into this, though, we have to start with terminology. Typography requires a new language. Much of this is based on historical printing usage and the font design process. Without at least a few of these terms you will be lost. This has been complicated now that all of the digital terms have been added to the mix. So, we really need to start with a little of font design. Not only the different … Continue reading →
Get a grip about Amazon! They’ll sell your books.
Writer Folks – Time to “Man-up” about Amazon. You don’t matter that much. « Andy Holloman – Novel – “Shades of Gray”. Andy has nailed it here. Amazon is too large to personally deal with each one of us. We need to be thankful that they’ll let us in—at all. Lulu is just as bad for the same reasons. The point is: You do not have to use them!
Continue reading →The easy way to fix your default paragraph and character styles
I received this question today from a friend: I made some mistakes when I set the original para styles and they have become some sort of default that has to be corrected for every new project. Do I have to delete the whole thing and start over again? I can do it, but I hope I can do it an easier way. Resetting your paragraph defaults is very easy. To do it globally (for InDesign as a whole), … Continue reading →
Getting set up to freely create your type
One of the more daunting aspects of book design for the inexperienced is page layout. Most people have Word experience and as I have said countless times already—Word cannot do professional page layout. In fact, it is worse than that because Word’s feeble attempts give you bad habits and poor expectations—which must be corrected. I’m assuming that you have your preferences set up; and that you have designed a good, efficient workspace that fits your style of … Continue reading →