01.28.07

4 colors x 144 pages x 4 weeks

Posted in Design, Reading, books, production, typography at 3:04 pm by India

Oh, do go look at Tom Christensen’s wickedly detailed walkthrough, Manuscript to Art Book in Four weeks: The Making of Masters of Bamboo. Cool, cool, cool!

(Thanks, Tom!)

8 Comments »

  1. xensen said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    Thank you for the link!

  2. India Amos said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:15 pm

    I’m amazed that you had the stomach to do such a painstaking postmortem, when in your place at this point I would have been all like, “I never want to see or think about this book again.” (Not that I could ever be in your place, because I’d have no idea how to produce something like this in six months, nevermind one.)

  3. xensen said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:21 pm

    Ha. Well, I do sort of feel that way, but I was on press and had some time to kill. I knew if I didn’t do it now I’d never do it. And I do love the baskets.

  4. xensen said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:24 pm

    By the way, I forgot to mention that what I received was unedited text. So while the design was going on I was also overseeing the editorial aspect. I should probably add some mention of that.

  5. India Amos said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    But of course.

  6. India Amos said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:48 pm

    And then . . . the press check. I’ve never been on one. What do you do? I was just reading an interview last week with a woman who just flies around the world doing press checks. She talks about the strength of printers’ coffee . . . I’ll try to find it.

  7. India Amos said,

    January 28, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    Ah, here it is.

    Suddenly, one of the ink stations caught on fire! I heard my press rep quietly inquire “Why are there flames shooting out of the fourth station?” Suddenly everyone was in a fury “Get back, get back.” Eyes bugged out, we were rushed back to the hotel and asked to wait for another whole day until they fixed the machine. More Coffeemate.

  8. xensen said,

    January 31, 2007 at 11:08 pm

    Well, I’ve never had a station catch fire. Mostly press checking is just boring — depending on how big your print run is, you might have a couple of hours of waiting, followed by 20 minutes of color correction, repeat over a few days. Adjusting color is fun (to me), but the presses are quite noisy,and the more I do it the more the fumes (inks and solvents) bother me — to be honest, I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing it for that reason.


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