Commission book dummy, text layout alternatives, 2017 copyright Douglas Stockdale
At the end of last week I posted about having a better defined book dummy; a straw man for the amount of pages I might need and well into the process of using post-it notes to signify what attributes of this book commission were going to end up where in the book.
I also stated that I was writing like a wild man and I was pretty sure that no-one was going to be impressed by a photograph of my keyboard (if someone is, let me know!). Nevertheless, what I am writing at some point needs to land inside the book. So last night I met up with Craig Evans, a layout designer, who is going to convert my writing using InDesign into what will eventually become the printed page. So first thing this morning I received a PDF of 30 pages of writing in a potential text layout for this book. Concurrently I had used MS Publisher to create a test page with the two-column layout we had discussed and I had envisioned for this book. I needed to have an idea of what my word-count was going to be per page which would then help me know a little more about the page-count should be.
So in the photo above are the two pages side-by-side within the book dummy of these two versions, each with a slightly different size and style of font, as well as a slight difference in header and paragraph spacing. I suspect we are going to dicker over the text layout so more. Nevertheless, we agree on many of the layout aspects, but when printing a book, it is all in the details.
Meanwhile, I am back to writing the rough edit once again.
Interestingly I have the photographs that I am going to use in my notes and we are also discussing the size, location and what paper we are going to print these on. More on that probably next week as we are really flying towards the publication deadline. Yikes.
Cheers,
Doug
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