Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’m working on my July issue of my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for The Dalesman using Adobe InDesign and Photoshop to fit everything in.
Being pressed for space I’ve tried to fit the swarming bees into the margin and, to add to the drama, instead of my usual smiling mugshot, I’ve tried a cartoon of Barbara and I on bee alert, blocking holes with steel wool and masking tape. This might not make it into the final cut, but I like to experiment.
I wanted to share my colourised Victorian photographs with my cousins in Sheffield so I’ve put together a ‘story-so-far’ booklet based on my recent blog posts.
Reading through the text again I’ve spotted one misnamed character, so it’s been worth doing it from that point of view but also seeing it in print helps me in considering the story that I’m hoping to tell.
In booklet form information isn’t just floating about in blog posts or stuffed into files, envelopes and albums distributed around my studio and the attic.
Page layouts for my Summer eBook using a three-column grid in InDesign.
The last day of meteorological summer and I’m gathering my sketchbook drawings from the last three months together for an eBook.
I’m experimenting with the eBook option in Adobe InDesign, going for an iPad format. This gives me a more control over the way words and images are presented than I get with my regular blog.
Rather than use a regular typeface, I decided to use the carved lettering on one of the tombstones in Brodsworth Church as my starting point for a title logo.
In true Roman fashion the stone mason used the chiselled ‘V’ that you’d find on a Roman inscription to represent an upper case ‘U’, so I patched one together from the lower half of an ‘O’ and two different capital ‘I’s, keeping the slant he’d used one to fit it into the word ‘AETATIS’ (‘age’).
I imported my title logo into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into three tones using Image Trace, then took that back into Photoshop and replaced the three tones with colours derived from my cover image.
When I first published Around Old Horbury in 1998 to launch at part of an exhibition at Horbury Library I borrowed a laser printer to print the pages in black and white but went for a colour cover using my own ink jet printer. I got the cover laminated and included a flip out town trail map.
That first edition would have been designed in Microsoft Publisher. That’s given me some problems as I was never able to get Publisher working on my iMac, even if I ran a virtual version of Windows 10 on the Mac using the Parallels program.
So I’m now revamping the booklet as an Adobe InDesign publication on the iMac. It’s an opportunity to simplify the typography, so I’m using just one typeface, Dolly Pro, for all the text and headings. The colour cover will stay the same, as I’ve had that printed and laminated professionally.
As I’ve mentioned, my approach to page design is normally to cram as much as I can on a double-page spread but after all the books on typography and graphic design that I’ve read recently and (see previous post) the cereal packets that I’ve studied, I’m trying for a calmer, clearer page layout for my Wakefield Women in History.
I’ve just started reading Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time and the classic page layout struck me as being a pleasure to read, so I’ve been using my layout ruler to measure margins, indents and leading (the space between lines) in the handsome hardback, published by Profile Books.
I’d normally go for a familiar, tried-and-tested, roman typeface like Garamond or Baskerville but an article by typographer Dan Rhatigan on Adobe Creative Cloud persuaded me to try a new ‘warm, fairly classic’ alternative for a book typeface, Dolly Pro, designed by Underware. It looks good to me but the test will be when I print a page on paper.
How do you get text to flow around the edges of an image?
Until today I hadn’t quite worked it out but, after a couple of hours of watching videos and searching through the online help, I’ve finally found a way of doing it in Adobe InDesign, the program that I use for designing my booklets and magazine articles.
I use the ‘Pen Tool’ to draw a box around the image but some of the settings that you need to make it work are hidden away in menus so, for my reference, and for anyone else searching on Google, I’m writing a series of step-by-step instructions (see link below).
Having worked out how that’s done, I’ve discovered an even easier method: using the ‘Pencil Tool’, you can draw around your image freehand using a mouse or a graphics tablet. InDesign converts this into a clipping path, which you can set to have the text flowing around it.
Wrap text around an image in Adobe InDesign a step-by-step guide.
It’s frustrating at times, but I have to admit that I’m enjoying going back to basics with my printed booklets, doing a bit of detective work to see where the hold up in printing speed is creeping in. So far, so good: this ultra-simple booklet with placeholder text prints out in a couple of minutes and it makes no difference if I use GIF images or larger format TIFs, which are about twice the size.
It’s such a pleasure to construct a really simple booklet, dropping little rough sketches in wherever I please, that it makes me want to design another booklet for real, perhaps taking a sketchbook and scanning the illustrations separately then typing up my handwritten notes.
I’m using Adobe InDesign CC 2017, a program which seems to have its quirks if, like me, you’re more used to Microsoft Publisher or Serif PagePlus.
Image manipulation and booklet printing get me every time: I always grab the frame rather than the image itself when I want to change its size, but surely by now I’ve learnt that you don’t select ‘Print’ if you want to print a booklet!
I’m steadily getting there.
The Apple iMac: the best machine on the planet for desktop publishing. Except if you actually need to print a paper copy . . .
I wonder if anybody has found a way of speeding up the printing process? I’d love to hear from you if you have.
Drawing maps for my booklets makes me want to go out and walk the route again. After nine years it’s time to revise my Walks around Newmillerdam, not just because there will have been a few changes to the footpaths but also because the Friends of Newmillerdam and Wakefield Tree Wardens have been making all kinds of improvements to the country park.