Tired of Hanging Around

My book is done. I have sent it off to the printers and it is gone. I thought I might take a moment to answer what may be the number one question on the minds of you, my readers.

"How does it feel?"

Tired. I am tired. Maybe once I am holding the book in my hands that will be replaced with elation, but for now I will stick with tired.

It is a satisfied tired, like after a really long run, when the endorphins are pumping through you're system and your muscles ache and you can feel your pulse in your face, but you know that you did something good. You collapse onto the couch, but you only succeed in getting it all sweaty and it itches against your hot skin. After a shower you lay stretched out on the floor, nude, looking at the ceiling, with your towel beneath you protecting you from the dirt and lint in the carpet that longs to cling to your wet skin.

The process of production (a stage which I will define as beginning with the end of the art and lasting until you send your book to press) is long and arduous. I really felt (and I mean believed) that once the art was done I could iron the kinks in the writing out in a day and get that sucker off to print. It should suprise no one to find that I was mistaken. There is an enormous amount of effort that goes into making something, anything, look professional. This itself is a topic large enough to create a whole blog around, but for now I will just touch on the basics.

Choosing your font is extremely important. I changed the type I was using time after time after time. How many times is that? That's a lot of times. But seriously, type is important. It is the medium through which your copy communicates its message. The first font I chose because I liked the look of it, but I neglected to take into account the color of the text within the context of the book. Combine this with the fact that the font came from a very small font family and you have a fatal error.

So I changed it. I pulled together a variety of fonts, that had a variety of desirable attributes and in the end their virtue was lost on the text because of a proliferation of types of fonts destroyed their individual identities. In the end I settled on a font that had a decent sized family, which retained its identity when stroked (a true typographic sin) and which suited the needs of my text. I then used a more expressive text for the shouted words and it started to look alright. For those of you who want more one this subject, see here.

As for myself, I will stop here for today. Look for these topics to show up soon at a blog near you:

Word Balloons!
File Formats!
Forcing Words to Work with Pictures!

Excited? I know I am.

In unrelated news: The Zutons!

...well sometimes I go out by myself and I look across the waaaaaaater....