Case Study - Some of our work

University of Southern California/Tsinghua University

Symposium on Green Technology and Energy Informatics

Program and Presenter Guide
 

The University of Southern California and Tsinghua University (Bejing, China) hold an annual conference on green technology and energy resources. This invitation-only event brings together some of the best minds in these fields to present their latest research. For the second year running, we were contracted to design and produce the program and presenter biography guide for this event. Bringing together information literally from the far corners of the world, we designed an easy-to-use guide that embraces the spirit of the event, with clean layouts and information presentation that guides the user to the information they need as quickly as possible. Printed on recycled paper, the guide was a huge hit both years.

Here you see the cover (opened, with the back on the left and the front on the right), the combined table-of-contents/schedule guide spread below it, and an interior spread from the section presenting biographies of the presenters and abstracts of their presentations, below that. We've provided a couple of inset enlargements so you can better see some of the detail.

Can you imagine a way in which something like this could serve your business? Give me a call and let's discuss it, or click here and send me an e-mail. I'll be in touch and we can get started.

Footnotes, and Styling, and E-books, Oh My!

A while back, I posted that I was launching some internal research into producing typographically-robust books in a manner that would be cost-effective to my customers. It's actually been a lot of fun, as I've worked through the ins-and-outs of developing this workflow.

Anybody can produce an e-book these days. There are free and nearly-free tools out there that make producing an e-book a snap. Producing a quality e-book, on the other hand, is quite another thing. Producing a quality e-book from the same set of files as the full-blown print edition? Holy Grail time, folks.

Here at The McNaughton Group, we've focused upon producing rich, well-designed and typeset printed books in efficient ways that bring the cost down into the realm occupied by vendors of much lower-quality products. We love great typography. Producing a low-quality e-book edition of one of these books is out of the question. Producing a quality e-book edition by running totally separate print and e-book workflows (the way most people do it) is out of the budget for almost every real-world book project. It's a chasm that hasn't been readily crossed - until now.

I'm happy to be able to share that we're in the final testing stages of a workflow that requires the manuscript to be layed out and typeset once, and then exported as full-quality print book on the one hand, and a high-quality e-book on the other, retaining all the rich typography that the e-book platform allows. One electronic layout file, that adapts itself seamlessly to the needs of both media.

How is this good for you and our other clients? The bottom line. You can now afford to get the best of both worlds. You won't have to sacrifice the quality of your print edition to fund the production of an e-book edition. You can have an e-book edition that shares the look-and-feel of your print edition. Future updates and revisions only need to be made to one set of layouts, not twice (and paid for twice) in totally separate workflows. Lower costs. Uncompromized quality. Easier, more-accurate editing.

I told myself that I wouldn't offer e-book production until I could do it this way. That day is here. Starting early next year, I'll be offering full print and e-book design, layout, and production for all our book projects. I hope this will help you in your book projects!

Small, Tiny, Critical Things

Sometimes there are little things that make all the difference. Something you might not even consider might make make or break your experience.

Take backups, for example. We run nightly backups on every project in the shop. Every night. And make backups to off-site every week. Even if a fire takes out the building, servers, and equipment, the work goes on. Your job is safe.

Does your graphic provider run backups? Daily?

Better ask.

Back to the Twentieth Century

It's remarkable how much we depend on the internet - and glaring when the connection goes down. We got it done today, even though it meant we were uploading projects through a cell phone. Thank goodness for unlimited data plans!

Beauty in the Age of E-books, Part 2

I attended a wonderful "Lunch and Learn" event today. Michael Levin, noted author and specialty book publisher, spoke today on the book as marketing tool. He made some exceptionally good points, and I found myself nodding and agreeing with much of what he said. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I recommend it.

A question was raised in the presentation with regards to how to differentiate one's book from the other authority-author titles currently flooding the market. In other words, "If I'm doing a book to differentiate myself from other people in my field, how do I differentiate my book from theirs?"

A very good question.

Let's face it, authors like Seth Godin have made a very good living on books that aren't terribly sophisticated in design or layout. By Seth's own admission, these were farmed out to a graphics student either still in, or just out of, art school. And it shows. Clip art for the cover, Times New Roman for the interior, and fit as much on the page as you can to minimize print costs. But Seth's books are meant for quick impulse sales for those attending his speaking events. Perhaps an equally impulsive sale by people reading his blog. His customers rarely, if ever, are exposed to the opportunity to compare his books to those of his competitors.

If you're a speaker of Seth's freqency and caliber, it may be a good strategy to save money on the production of your books. But if you're selling on Amazon or on a brick-and-mortar bookstore, that's just not going to cut it. Your prospects will have every opportunity to examine your book alongside those of your competitors. Amazon even lets people read some interior pages before the purchase. In that environment, your prospective reader gets a few seconds to look at the cover, scan a few pages, and maybe read the dust jacket. Your content is getting little attention in this scenario. What counts? As in human relationships, first impressions. How does it look? How does it feel? Is the page readable? Does it look like an authoritative book - or does it look like something you banged out in MSWord?

Authors like to think that their content is really what a book is all about. That without their content, the book is meaningless. In a very real sense, they're absolutely correct. But the content isn't the only thing about a book that matters. I like to make an analogy to the automobile. One could certainly say that the engine is what makes a car. Without an engine, a car is meaningless. But only a fool neglects styling and comfort in designing and manufacturing a car. Driversneed an engine and, ultimately, the engine creates the purpose and usefullness in the car. But oftentimes the actual purchase decision is driven by look and feel. Even in books, neglect that reality at your peril.

Beauty in the Age of E-Books

I've been thinking a lot lately about books, book publishing, and the future of both. Because so much of our business depends upon long-document production (from brochures to full-blown books and catalogs) the future of the visual word is a matter we take seriously here at The McNaughton Group.

I count myself a book-lover, but sticking my head in the sand about the surging popularity of e-books seems particularly suicidal, in the business sense. While "the death of print" has been "right around the corner" for a couple of decades now, something is really going on this time, and it looks an awful lot like the first few years of the transition to digital photography from its analog roots.

I actually have no problem with e-books, per se. I have Kindle on my smartphone and I use it. I'm quite seriously considering the purchase of a 'hardware' Kindle in the near future. I see the value in digital book distribution.

No, my problem lies in the notion of CRAFT. Just as the mobile editor with which I'm writing this post forced me into emphasis-by-capitalization instead of the more elegant use of italics for that purpose, so too the current e-book world is a wasteland of craftless... I hesitate to actually use the words 'typography' and 'design' here.

Kindle and ePub (the latter format is used by Apple in its various iOS devices) are both based upon HTML, the language used to lay out web pages. Very little of the nuance and craft available to me in print books is even an option in either of these formats.

So where does someone like me create value in a world of vanilla e-books? Is it possible to create a truly BEAUTIFUL e-book, as much for its visual appearance as for the content contained within that appearance? I think the answer to the latter question may, indeed, be 'yes', but as with all transitional periods, there are few, if any, tools to properly accomplish the task. We're very much back to the 'Dark Ages' of digital production, in the fashion of the worst early days of 'Desktop Publishing', building craft again in a new land. And in that process lies the answer to the former question as well - without efficient tools, beauty becomes an unaffordable, unmarketable luxury in many cases. So we'll be looking at this whole subject very carefully here at The McNaughton Group, and doing LOTS of testing!

Rhapsody: Apple has gone too far

We've been following the latest Apple, Inc. story, regarding content sold through apps on the various iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.) If you haven't heard, Apple just changed their standard agreements to say that any vendor that delivers paid content (subscriptions, books, music, videos, etc.) through an app, now must remove any link to an outside purchase site for the content (usually their own website) inside the app, and instead put in a link to subscribe or purchase that content through the new Apple Subscription Store. They can still sell the content through their own site, but can no longer have anything but a link to Apple's store for that purchase inside the app.

Sounds fairly innocuous. So what's the kicker? Thirty percent of the gross sell-price goes directly to Apple if something is sold through their store. And the other kicker? Vendors must charge the same price for the content, whether it's sold through Apple or through their own site. No marking up the content in the Apple store to make up for Apple's 'take'. Keep in mind, most of these vendors make less than 30% margin on content sales in the first place. And if the only link in the app to buy content is to Apple's store, where do you think the bulk of purchases will be made? This is an untenable business model for most, regardless of the popularity of the iOS devices.

You can imagine that vendors such as the New York Times, Amazon.com, and others have a bit of a problem with this. One of them, Rhapsody, has finally had enough. They're pulling their content from the iOS devices unless Apple changes the policy. Presumably others will follow in short order. With Android breathing down Apple's throat in both smartphone and tablet form, I can't see how this policy can stand. Apple is banking on their incredible market penetration to strong-arm content providers into knuckling under to this - I'm going to say it - highway robbery. I think the marketing wizards at Apple are about to get a lesson in hubris.

Here's a link to an article on the Rhapsody challenge to Apple:

Rhapsody: Apple has gone too far