Layout and Design

Which program to use?

• Adobe In-design, becoming an industry standard due to the popularity of the Adobe

products. Not very difficult to get to grips with if you know another Adobe program such as

Photoshop or Illustrator. I would encourage you to use In-Design, it is fast becoming industry

standard and any experience with this program will be a good thing to have.

• Quark Express. This has been the industry standard for many years and is still popular with

many publishers. It is a good idea to have a working knowledge of this if you are looking to

go into publishing in the future. It is coming under increased pressure nowadays because of

the rising popularity of the Adobe CS programs.

• Adobe Photoshop. Simply the best choice for editing photographs however it is not suitable

for layout purposes.

• Adobe Illustrator. Another industry standard from Adobe, this is a brilliant program for

creating vector designs and illustrations. It is also great for quickly coming up with the page

design and layout however for the full booklet you should transfer the design over to either

Quark or In-Design.

Online, On Demand Publishing Houses

The two most common are lulu.com and Blurb.com. Lulu does provide very good results and they

have a number of advantages over Blurb if you are thinking about wide distribution of the travel

guide. The first thing, and probably one of the more important points to keep in mind is that they

provide a free ISBN number. This is the number you need of you want to sell your book over Amazon,

eBay or in a bookstore. This is automatic and is set up in the first few steps when you register with

Lulu. Lulu is also tied into online sellers such as Amazon as well as having a similar system to blurb in

which people can order books directly through the website. You do not need to keep a stock of books

and send them out when bought. We dp publsih as an E-Book.

The reason for choosing Blurb over Lulu can mainly be the type of book to publish, namely a

photography book. They provide In-Design templates, ICC profiles for colour correction and Adobe

Acrobat PDF Presets. This means that you could fully soft proof your book before sending off for

publishing. They also appear to have more uniform quality control over their printing process using

the same ICC and Adobe Presets for each printer where as Lulu appear to use a number of different

printers without any specific profiles installed, this may lead to variation in the quality and

appearance of images.

Please set up a master page without too much trouble.

Links:

Quark Express

http://www.quark.com/en/

InDesign

https://creative.adobe.com/products/indesign

Initial Planning

What do you want to show with the guide and how do you plan to structure it?

• By area

• By topic

• Alphabetically

• Other?

What would be the best way to show this? Any ideas?

• Colours

• Symbols

• Other?

Page Layout.

Design of booklet.

This determines how you want the booklet to look. The decisions you take at this time effect the

whole project. It is important to set these choices in stone early on in the project. Changes made at a

later date tend to be time consuming and difficult to implement.

• Size of page

• Layout of material on page - column width, photography etc.

• Text Size

• Placement of headings

• Colour choices

• Any symbols needed?

• Maps

• Illustrations

• Consistency

Take ownership of your design and have confidence in the decisions you have made. With such a

large group you will get a lot of opinions about the design and layout. As much as it is important to

listen and take on board what they say it is also important to justify your design and stand firm on

the design decisions. At this early stage you could hold a meeting to brainstorm and collect ideas

from the whole group, this way people feel that they have had an input and are more willing to

accept the design. Also it is a great way to gather ideas that you may not have considered before.

Set up of a Master Page.

This is the main page you set up to define the headers, footers, bleed, column height and width,

gutters, page numbers and of course the size of page. From this all the other pages can be duplicated

and the layout is consistent throughout.

• Size of page

• Bleed

• Gutter

• Header

• Footer

• Page Numbers

Organizational Structure when setting up the design aspect

of the project.

Style guide.

This is something quite separate from the design and layout of the booklet. This is a set of

instructions you give the writers concerning how you want the text.

• In what format

• With what information

• style guide, practical information to be given in the writing workshops

• Guidelines for photographs

Hold a meeting to discuss this with everybody on the program. It is essential that they understand

what the style guide is and why it is so important to stick to it.

Photography.

Of course you will want to include photographs in the booklet. The good thing is, with everyone

having a digital camera nowadays, it is really simple to gather good photographs around the city from

everyone in the group. If they are writing an article tell them to also take a picture of the place when

they are there.

It is also good to take as many pictures around the city as possible, these are great for the front

covers or when you are in need of a generic picture.

The pictures also need to be organized and categorized otherwise it ends up in a lot of work and time

wasting when doing the final layout.

It is also essential that you use pictures 300 dpi or above. However do not go too big otherwise the

end file size of the booklet will become unmanageable.

Availability and accessibility of the material you want to put

into the booklet.

Another thing to set up early in the project is a system in which you can store and access the material

you want to include in the booklet. This is mainly concerned with the text and the photographs you

want to use.

A good way to do this is to set up a Google documents account for the project. In this you can define

folders that correspond to the layout you have decided on. The members of the group can then log in

and put their articles or photographs in the correct folder where you can access it quickly and easily.

Make it clear that the articles should be in the correct format, edited and if possible proofed before

they are deposited in the folder.

Also make it clear that miscategorised, unfinished or articles that do not adhere to the style guide

will not be used. It is the responsibility of the writers to take charge of their work and ensure that it is

ready to simply be copied and pasted into the publication.

You really have to be quite hardnosed about this. Trust me, you will have more than enough work by

the end of the project without others making work for you.

Proofing.

You should find out which members of the group are good with spelling and punctuation and if any

have had experience with editing and proofreading. It is very important that the articles are gone

through thoroughly and any mistakes corrected before it is handed over to the designers for the final