🚀 go-pugleaf

>When I was doing it for a living, it wasn't the design which got harder
>when the publication became more complex, it was the coordination of the
>facilities/staff/schedules which took more care. Just like an engineering
>project :-).

Definitely. When I was doing 100 copies at 20 pages at the copymat it was
easy. It's even easier at apple, where you print out the masters and give
them to the A.A. and let them worry about getting 100 copies for the meeting
Friday.. (hee-hee). When OtherRealms hit 60 pages, offset, it became a major
operation to get all the masters together, laid out, pasted up and to the
printer in time to meet the opening he reserved for me on the press so I
could get it back in time to get them labelled, stamped and mailed.

What I do now is pick a mailing date, then start working backward -- so many
days to label, so many days at the printer (add in the two that he
invariably runs late), so many days of pasteup, etc, etc. To mail an issue
on June 30, I need to have masters to my printer no later than the first
week in June (maybe June 10), which implies that all the material needs to
be in early enough to let me have the masters ready. OtherRealms these days
works on a six week lead time, and that works mainly because a lot of my
material comes in even earlier and allows me a chance to hack on it in spare
moments. (I should note that it doesn't *have* to be six weeks. I could, for
instance, get two or three day turnaround from my printshop. But then I'd be
a priority job instead of a fill job and add 25% to the printing costs. I
could use a mailing service to handle labels and postage issues, but that'd
cost money, too. and etc...). 

>In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the bigger
>the book, the easier it was to design. You get your format standardized,
>and from then on it's pretty much plug-and-go.

Definitely. Once you settle on a general format, it's plug and play through
the rest of the document. I can lay out 28 pages of OtherRealms, including
art and all the graphic aspects, in about three days -- *if* the text and
art and stuff is ready. If I'm doing an edit-layout-proof-fix-proof cycle on
everything, it takes a lot longer. At the same time, I've been designing
some collateral materials, like flyers to hand out at conventions, and a two
page unfolded flyer is driving me completely batty -- because I don't want
it to look like all the *other* two page unfolded ugly flyers that litter
the convention tables being ignored. And because there *are* only two pages,
there's no room for error like there is in OtherRealms, where I can fudge
page 12 a bit and the continuity will help me past the glitches. And having
hacked on this stuff for about four years, I can point to my recent business
card fiasco. It's amazing how much garbage you can create in 2x3 inches...




Chuq Von Rospach      =|=     Editor,OtherRealms     =|=     Member SFWA/ASFA
         chuq@apple.com   =|=  CI$: 73317,635  =|=  AppleLink: CHUQ
      [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.]

You are false data. Therefore I shall ignore you.