All I know about Indesign is that it is a part of an expensive Professional
software package. And I shoot Pentax and so have never felt that it was
appropriate to use Professional software.
However, I have designed or assisted in design of 6-8 Blurb books and thus have
thought about the process and encountered many of the pitfalls at least once.
So, some general comments.
First, I think your black border around the swordfish is probably there on many
other pages as well. The other black lines just don't show up well on the black
backgrounds as it does on the yellow background of this page. It looks as
though the image is not filling the frame, and the black line is the empty
space.
Most of your images are full-bleed. When they are presented opposite smaller
images (e.g., leaf and coiled rope near the front) the second page looks
unbalanced to me. It works well on your copyright and facing page, given the
use of text to balance and fill the gaps. {Meg and I get into this every time
we work on a book. She wants the image frames to be uniformly aligned top-left,
sometimes top-center; I generally prefer centering the image frames on the
page.)
I understand the concept of "content balancing" the images on facing pages and
through successive pages in the book so that there is some unifying "theme" but
I think you over do it. E.g., with the two high-contrast shots of eagle and of
two dancers. I think I would have trouble examining and appreciating the
individual images because I would be processing the story you are trying to
tell by that juxtaposition. Particularly since only your Dancer theme has more
than two images to represent it. So my question is whether you want these
images to be appreciated in their own right, or is it the theme's that matter?
If Images is the answer, I would either scramble the image positions somewhat
so that the pairings are not so blatantly in-your-face, or I would go with
blank even pages. Which would eliminate the issue of slightly different size
images facing one another.
I don't know how the flow from Indesign to Blurb works, so the following may or
may not be an issue. But you've laid out a Copyright page that doesn't look
like Blurb's template in Booksmart and doesn't have comments about Blurb. So
when you flow your work into Blurb, will you wind up with a second
Title/Copyright page?
stan
On Dec 22, 2011, at 5:16 AM, Larry Colen wrote:
> First of all, let me say that when it comes to being intuitively obvious and
> easy to use indesign sucks.
>
> I've managed to crunch through the worst of the issues and put together a
> first draft for the contents. I still haven't done the cover.
>
> I'd appreciate feedback, particularly if suggestions for what to do, are
> accompanied by how to do it.
> For example, the photo of the swordfish sculpture is surrounded by a black
> line which I seem to be completely incapable of making go away.
> None of the other pages, with a similar layout seem to have the same problem.
>
> Likewise the lack of page numbers, titles or a table of contents can be
> attributed to either artistic simplicity, or the fact that I'm totally
> clueless about how to do so, and don't have a lot of time to waste trying to
> figure them out.
>
> If you'd like to have a look, and tell me what I did right, or wrong, I put
> the pdf at:
> http://red4est.com/lrc/books/lrc_2011_0.pdf
>
> The more I do this, the more I admire and appreciate the job that Mark has
> done on the annual.
>
> --
> Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est
>
>
>
>
>
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