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 →Alexandar Charchar put together a major statement on modern typography yesterday—written by Espen Brunborg called Respect Thy Typography. You need to read it. Espen starts out with a strong statement of hope for me: Good typography shouldn’t have to rely on ornamental crutches to stand tall. Yet despite all the tools and knowledge available to us, we readily embrace a flourishing, decorative typography, with cheap tricks used in a misguided attempt to make it “pop”. This ancient art may rapidly … Continue reading →
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 →
Last week I talked about the basic 256 characters in a “normal 8-bit” font . We covered the keystrokes used to access what the PC calls the Upper ASCII glyphs. Then I began to talk about additional characters that will not fit into a normal font. We started with small caps and numbers: oldstyle figures, lining figures, and small cap figures. Today we finish a very brief coverage of additional characters. Ligatures In some cases, letters simply … Continue reading →
A font is a very specific thing. A font is the entire set of characters for a given type style. In the days of letterpress (1460 to 1970), a font was all the characters in a given point size. You had Times 12-point, Times 14-point, Garamond 18-point, and so on. In some old fonts, this was hundreds of characters. When phototype became available in the 1950s, a font came in several sizes. These film strips could be … Continue reading →
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 →
I spent much of last weekend designing a book in iBooks Author. It was a horrendous experience. But then the application wasn’t designed for my use. A book design tool for amateurs giving away free books First of all, I must mention that the process of dialing back from InDesign to less than Pages is a huge leap backwards. Like Liz Castro, I was excited about the possibilities suggested by the hype. She found ten reasons why … Continue reading →
The basic parts of type Again, we need some more basic language definitions. Without it, I can not help you in your ministry. You can see above how the point size of the type relates to the ascender, cap height, x-height, baseline, and descender. More importantly, you get a glimpse of things that are important in the world of typography. This illustration is from an introduction to typography in publishing found in Appendices A & B in … Continue reading →
Things have changed so much in book publishing, that you must understand the new paradigm and why this means you must understand typography. Self-published authors must learn the art of communication with type. This is an excerpt from Writing In InDesign 2nd Edition which will be released as soon as possible. Here’s a link to the 1st edition _________________________________________ Writing within InDesign Here I am again recommending a road less traveled by—not unusual in my life and work. … Continue reading →
If you ever took one of my classes, you know how much I harped on readability—especially the importance of aperture and other page layout factors concerning readability. Aside from the kindness issue (blessing your readers), this is governed by the realities of modern living. Everyone has too much to read. If you give them any excuse, they will quit reading your work and go on to the next piece in their long list of things they have … Continue reading →