04.30.08
“If I spike you, you’ll know you’ve been spoken to.”
So, the other day, I was asked to set up HTML for an e-mail that someone else—let’s call them Agent B—is sending. Today Agent B sent us a preview of the e-mail, with the Agent B logo added at the top and the usual “Click here to unsubscribe, etc., etc.” at the bottom, but the middle of the message—my part—has become completely verkakte in the process. So I looked at the code and found that my nice, clean, valid HTML had been run through MS Word’s garbagealator. For example, this—
<p>Sunday, May 18, 2008<br />
11am to 5pm<br />
The Times Center<br />
242 West 41st Street</p>
—was converted to this—
<p =
style=3D'mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:7.5pt;margin-bottom:12.0pt;
margin-left:7.5pt'><font size=3D3 color=3Dblack face=3DHelvetica><span =
lang=3DEN
style=3D'font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black'>Sunday, May =
18, 2008<br>
11am to 5pm<br>
The<span class=3Dapple-converted-space> <st1:place =
u2:st=3D"on"><st1:placename u2:st=3D"on"></span><st1:place
w:st=3D"on"><st1:PlaceName =
w:st=3D"on">Times</st1:placename></st1:PlaceName><span
class=3Dapple-converted-space> <st1:placetype =
u2:st=3D"on"></span><st1:PlaceType
=
w:st=3D"on">Center</st1:placetype></st1:place></st1:PlaceType></st1:place=
><br>
<st1:street u2:st=3D"on"><st1:address u2:st=3D"on"><st1:Street =
w:st=3D"on"><st1:address
w:st=3D"on">242 West 41st =
Street</st1:address></st1:street><u1:p></u1:p></st1:address></st1:Street>=
</span></font><font
color=3Dblack face=3DHelvetica><span =
style=3D'font-family:Helvetica;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>=
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04.28.08
Ha, ha, ha, . . .
“This, is an unsettling trend,” columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. “We’re seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries.”
—“Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere,” The Onion
Photo: a row of commas by moirabot / Moira Clunie; some rights reserved.
04.26.08
Need a quick C-note?
Kevin Pease of Designrants points out the following excellent opportunity—which, oddly, he doesn’t wish to take!—for an up-and-coming type designer to make a few bucks and gain some experience for his or her résumé:
The project is for outputing a variant Typeface from an existing open source Typeface, where the variant is replacing only 1 alphabet (upper,lower case, basic and italic) and putting a sanskrit alphabet (upper,lower case, basic and italic) that will have to be designed.
. . .
The budget is about $100 via Paypal, Moneybookers. Delivery for early/mid-next week.
Um, I don’t know much about designing typefaces, and nothing about Sanskrit, but that sounds . . . how shall I put it? . . . extremely challenging. Still, if you’re really hard up for cash and selling your spinal fluid isn’t working out for you, perhaps this is your dream project. If so, see Kevin’s post for more details!
Via Ultrasparky.
04.24.08
Making trees’ deaths worthwhile, since 1972
I’m trying to close some browser tabs that I’ve been carrying along for at least two months, and I just can’t click the little x on this one without mentioning it. Scott K. Kellar, bookbinder and conservator? Does some really lovely work. Go look.
04.20.08
Well, nobody can accuse book designers of price fixing.
Tom Christensen did an informal survey of four book designers to find out how much they’d charge for a hypothetical job.
I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems, interior and cover/jacket design. . . .
According to the 2001 edition of the Graphic Artists Guild handbook of Pricing and Ethics, for an average poetry book a designer might charge $7,500 to $15,000 to design and set the interior plus $1000–$2000 for the jacket. That gives a total range of $8500–17,000. Those figures are seven years old, but several people say the prices in this publication skew high.
Yes, in my experience, they do.
The results? Each different, like a snowflake: $3,100, $8,000, $8,800, and $12,800. See Tom’s post for each designer’s breakdown of charges: rightreading: Book design fees.
Photo: price list by Nick Sherman; some rights reserved.
04.18.08
For anyone else who ever wondered
So I was trying to find an example of a paragraph-styled bibliography in the Chicago Manual when I had one of those irrelevant thoughts that so often interrupt my work: “I wonder if, using the magic of the internet, I could find out what books these sample pages are from?”
—Languagehat: Fun with the Chicago Manual.
(Via Margaret’s del.icio.usness)
Photo: my favorite corner by limonada / Emilie Eagan; some rights reserved.
The Americana
I’m working on another Flickr set of public domain images—this time, ones from The Americana: A Universal Reference Library Comprising the Arts and Sciences, Literature, History, Biography, Geography, Commerce, etc., of the World, Vol. 21 (Triennial Act–Vivianite), edited by Frederick Converse Beach (New York: Scientific American Compiling Department, 1912).
Extracted, cleaned up (as best I could; most of them suffered from a particularly nasty pink-and-green moiré), captioned, and tagged for your pleasure. Go forth and repurpose them in peace.
I’ve downloaded a lot more old encyclopedias to cannibalize after this one. Idle time is the only constraint. Watch this space!
Other public domain Flickr sets:
04.16.08
A PSA to U.S. publishers that do not have legal departments
(and to anyone else in the United States who hires freelance designers):
If the designer of your book’s jacket or interior is not an employee of your company, rather than an independent contractor, and if you do not have a written contract that expressly says that the design work was done “for hire,” then you do not own the design.
This means that if you or anyone else wishes to reuse it—say, if you sell paperback or foreign rights to another publisher—you can’t just send along the layout files. You do not own them. They do not belong to you. You must negotiate a usage fee with the designer. It will probably cost you money.
