

This goal is so far outside the norm in traditional publishing today that there is no room at all for an author who even cares about these things. My pursuit of functional, reader-centered books has been fraught with trials. One of my major concerns as I started to write books in the mid-1990s was my experience of using published textbooks as examples of poor communication. Graphic designers are visual people, focused on how things look. They are treated as two entirely separate skill sets. In the publishing world there is a real disconnect between the writers and the book designers. In fact, this is still true now that graphic designers are responsible for laying out Websites, blogs, and many other distributors of the words you write. This has been a major fight because many designers never read the copy they design into books and printed materials. For years I have taught graphic designers that the content is all that matters. Of course as a writer this may not make much sense to you. They are missing the best tools for communicating with their readers. What they do not realize : this simple fact starts their book under a great handicap. I fully recognize that most people write in Word. Before the choruses rise up in defense of other workflows, let me tell you my reasonings. Here I am again recommending a road less traveled by-not unusual in my life and work. More and more I was doing everything in InDesign except the photos done in Photoshop. Writing books became a real joy to me as InDesign kept getting better and better. With Lulu, then CreateSpace, then Scribd, then Zazzle, then Kindle, and then ePUBs, my world radically changed. I was supplying them to my students off the class website as downloadable PDFs. I continued to write new instructional materials. While all of this was going on, in 1996, I developed a complete online version of all my coursework at my community college.
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Publishing with InDesign was one of the first books on this new software that would quickly take over the industry, I wrote a book a year for them on typography, FreeHand, Illustrator, Photoshop, and finally InDesign. I used that opportunity to develop one of the first printing and design programs in the country that was all digital. Within a couple of years a large traditional publisher was asking me to convert my handouts into a book on the new digital printing. I began teaching these materials in 1991.
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I spent a decade as an art director myself within the largest commercial printer in Albuquerque. I learned typesetting and graphic design at the hands of a masterful art director in the late 1970s. I began as a fine artist in the 1960s and early 1970s. I have been uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new workflow. One of the trials of this new paradigm is the incredible amount of knowledge required and the various skills necessary to do all of this. We can easily adjust content, layout, and the entire presentation of our books in response to emails, FaceBook friends, tweets, and the whole host of contemporary social interactions online. The content and design remain fluid as we shape the book while we learn and grow. The modern book is released in multiple sizes, versions, and formats-in print, online, and as e-books. One of the wonderful things about the new publishing paradigm is the control we get as artists, authors, and designers over the entire package. She couldn’t find anyone else even talking about it. She was desiring to do the same thing-work creatively within Adobe InDesign to produce completed books almost as a fine art exercise. Here’s his story:Ī recent email conversation with a new friend (who is working on her book) made it obvious that what I am doing is nearly unique. David has a unique method for writing and designing his books and a passionate reason for it too. I’m very pleased to present you today with a guest article by author, teacher and graphic designer David Bergsland.

These specialists commonly do not understand your content.Let’s talk about some simple examples of this lack of concern for the reader.
