BOOK.DESIGN
Best Practices
A unique area of specialty of Point.B Studio is creating media that can be published on multiple platforms, most notably web sites that will also be published in print form. Our most recent project of this nature involved publishing the recollections of former Port Orford Mayor Leon White as a series of online anecdotes that were compiled into a booklet for his 85th birthday. The stories were illustrated with photographs from the Port Orford Historical Photos project and researched for accuracy by citizen historians.
The photo below shows early mock-ups of the first covers printed to vellum so decisions could be made regarding type specs. Since the fonts varied wildly in regards to what is commonly referred to as “x-height” and “line-height” in traditional typography, the space that the title of the book needed to be gauged by eye.
Editing the book in Sigil, our eBook tool of choice:
You can view the full series of “Code Swaraj” books at the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/CodeSwaraj/mode/2up. The launch page for the book, also designed by Point.B Studio, is here.
The book below was another production intensive project that involved designing the two volume set book covers, expressing the equations as MathML, redrawing the graphics, photo-retouching the images, and designing/typesetting the book in HTML/CSS and converting it to PDF with a programming tool (better described as a scripting language) known as PrinceXML.
Exploring The Internet
“Exploring The Internet” is another book we designed web, print, epub and cover files for, complete with an animated SVG of the section graphic: https://public.resource.org/eti/Section_0.html which is a state-of-the-art example of scalable vector animation.
Title 8
The studio also excels at creating visually appealing book covers. We'll be adding more to this page. One such example is below:
This full book can be found at: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/de/title8.web.pdf, also designed and produced by Point.B Studio.
Life On A Redwood Post
“Life on a Redwood Post” was a delightful collaboration with the late Scott Peden, photographer, plant expert and docent of the California State Parks. We helped Scott organize and illustrate his large archive of insect photographs with the idea to continue the book as a series. This project was the focus of The Rural Design Collective Mentoring Program in 2013: https://sixes.net/allnewrdcHQ/LoaRWP.htm. We are happy to report that the book is currently available at the Mountain Parks Foundation Nature Store which undoubtedly would please Scott Peden very much.
DESIGN and COPYEDITING / Rebecca Malamud
PHOTOGRAPHY / Scott Peden
PRODUCTION / The Rural Design Collective Mentoring Program
More at: http://sixes.net/LoaRWP and here. A nice tribute to Scott can be found here.
eBook Enlightenment
EBook Enlightenment was another project of The Rural Design Collective Mentoring Program. Read more at the Project Page established during the summer program here
A World’s Fair for the Global Village
Book, book cover and jacket, print collateral, CD-ROM and website designed and produced in collaboration with the author. The book production was a graphic intensive task with photographs and images being sent over the Internet from many different countries, and screen shots of the fair's many pavilions needing to be captured, processed and documented for print production. Several original illustrations were created for the book as well, and in some cases pavilions were created (as with Aw Kaw Taw shown here). The design made effective use of an alternating manuscript grid interspersed with modular photographic grids to present a layout sophisticated enough to balance the many elements that tell the story of the fair.
This uniquely designed and written book is out of print and available from the publisher, MIT Press. It is also available through Point.B Studio.
More book design (a.k.a. "Publishing Art") can be viewed here.