Advice needed. Graphic design problem

I’m having a difference of opinion with someone about what is actually involved in doing a job and how long it should take, so I thought I would ask the assembled talents of f.com for their thoughts.

The task is to create a ‘ready for publication’ document, a book in fact. The text is supplied in MS Word format, together with instructions regarding layout and illustrations/photos required. (This is all in English, with translations added.) The pics come from image banks or specially commissioned artists, so I assume they come in some standard format. The other design elements, such as title bars and ‘icons’ to denote certain activities have to be created by the designer or artists.

The product is an English text book, containing 12 units of approximately ten pages each. The simplest page would contain one large illustration, title bar, and a few lines of text. The most complex will contain several ‘section’ markers, smaller illustrations, and maybe some more complex element such as a family tree or board game.

My questions are:

  1. What hardware and software would be ‘industry standard’ for this sort of task? (CPU and memory requirements please.)

  2. Assuming that you have the right computer, how big should the average file be to work with. ie how many pages?

  3. If you’re doing everything right, and have all the pieces, how long would be normal to lay out one unit of ten pages? 1hr, 1 day, 1 week?

  4. Given a ‘normal’ number of changes to make (Chinese person formatting English text, requiring proofreading)and assuming that the designer has followed the instructions given, how long should it take to complete one revision?

  5. Is it necessary to have all the pieces in place before you start laying out the unit? ie if you’re waiting for stuff, can you go ahead and lay it all out then go back and change it without putting significantly more hours into the task? (Assume you have other work to do in the meantime.)

All reasonably intelligent comments gratefully accepted. Please indicate whether you’re a professional, have some reason to know these things, or are just uninformed and opinionated like me. (Yes, I’m having trouble accepting the things I’m being told by the supposed experts, so I’m looking for outside opinions.)

Thanks

Red Frog, much appreciated.

Next question: As a designer, would you advocate using many different fonts in one unit? The writers say no, for educational reasons. What would an expert in the visual field say?

What would take the longest time is creating the template. Some people can be sooooooo picky about spacing, sizes, fonts, and all those little details. Designers will notice; everyone else will just have a sense if it’s good or amazing. I see so many books (been looking at cookbooks lately) that most people would say are beautiful and I think they’re so so. Sometimes, only a few changes are necessary to go from good to great.

I have run InDesign CS2 on my MacBook Pro. Not bad but not a happy camper. Photoshop same. Quark is Intel native and runs great.

For fonts, maybe. With the most complex books, you usually don’t need more than a few fonts. Even with 2-4, many fonts come in variations of weight (extra light, light, compact, standard, medium, heavy, semibold, bold…). You can often get by with spacing to distinguish elements like chapter titles and section headers…

So many ways to design. If the design is important, I’d pick someone who’s done tons of books.

I did educational book publishing (just like this) for 2 years though I never made any of the templates myself. They were all textbooks and fairly bland. So I got a chance to know Quark really well but didn’t do too much of the design, just production.

btw, for anyone using Photoshop on an Intel Mac, there’s rumors of a public beta of Photoshop CS3 coming out this month.

red frog says good stuff. go with the adobe/mac path and its (usually) easier from here to the printers.

one unit per day or they’re out!

fewer fonts the better, kids often prefer non-serif fonts like arial . and they scale well too.

templates are OK but why not just use the first unit as the template for all the rest?

yes, i’m an editor, and i was once a teacher (older kids). but i’m also opinionated. as many others can tell you.

of course. What I mean is settling on all the design specifics. After you create all the styles and style sheets, it’s only a matter of applying them. That part is very fast. Applying paragraph styles takes no time. You can also automate many other processes like inserting graphics thru scripting (like AppleScript). Unless you’re doing math equations or something else that takes more time, after you’ve decided on the layout, formatting the text is so easy.

i have found that unless you use the same template for a while, it is 1) faster and 2) design-wise much more beneficial to choose your styles, font sizes, etc, using the actual material for the first (or first ‘standard’) chapter. then set that as a template, by just cutting everything out and leaving the formatting in place. if you design the template in the comfort of your lounge room chair (using dummy material), it almost invariably needs some tweaking when you actually get to test-drive it on the actual text and pictures and page size you finally use.

YMMV

we had to do 10-14 modules per week where i once worked. (geez, i love bean counters :slight_smile: templates came in handy then, but they were always modified again for each module. for example, you may well use more words per lesson in later modules, and have to change layout or text sizes.

Wow, you all have just finished the first book just now?

:slight_smile: Four books written, four more to go. One sample unit of one book laid out over a period of about a month. I’m not happy with it either. Lots of excuses from the design people.

The man paying for this wants to know how long it will take to finish. I’m getting outsource bids via elance.com to do one book in less than a month for under US$1000, by people who speak English. This is new territory for me, but compared to the cost of paying an in-house designer who doesn’t speak English, plus a translator, to work at this speed…

What would you do?

I’m sure there are lots of pitfalls with doing this all online and if anyone knows what they are then I would appreciate their comments. On the plus side, I have a team of writers working from home who submit good quality text on schedule. Can designers do the same?

[quote=“tmwc”]Red Frog, much appreciated.

Next question: As a designer, would you advocate using many different fonts in one unit? The writers say no, for educational reasons. What would an expert in the visual field say?[/quote]

Depends. In your particular case (textbooks), I would suggest no. It is “painful” to the eyes to have to look at a lot of different fonts. Choose a heading font, a text block front, and another font to capture attention, so let’s say 3 fonts maximum. Stay away from those “cool” fonts that are difficult to read instead opt for those easy to read fonts, especially for the text blocks.

Thanks all.

Any thoughts on outsourcing internationally?