chelsiemess's blog

This week I collaborated with Trish on our showcase posters and handouts. We got everything done on Monday evening, and I had everything printed at the library.

This week I also worked on converting the Uses of Grammar text into the EPub format. Unfortunately, I ran into more issues that I originally anticipated.

Over Thanksgiving break I finished my display poster for the showcase. The poster overviews the project, my goals, problems/difficulties, and reflections. I am going to have it printed up at Staples this week.

I also used Hype to make a small mobile site for the project. The mobile site contains a few fun infographics I made that relate to the design/layout process. I also have a QR code that links directly to the site.

Everything is just about ready to go! I am just waiting to get the final corrections of the text from the proofreader. Then we will be sending the book off to the printers.

I haven't quite decided on the format of my poster/display for the Future of the Book showcase. I am planning to include an overview of the project, the process of creating the layout, challenges/problems I ran into with solutions, and a general reflection on my work.

This past week I took it a bit easy while waiting for the corrected proof from the author. I did come up with a potential cover idea to show Dr. Blakesley in class tomorrow. Dr. Blakesley and I also need to talk about generating the front matter and index for the book.

In this next week I plan to solidify my marketing/promotion plans and finish up any proof corrections and changes.

Whew! I finished the first draft of the layout proof on Monday morning--just in the nick of time to meet my much-amended deadline. Going through and double-checking the text took me much longer than I anticipated, but I finally had the file ready to send to Dr. Blakesley by Tuesday afternoon.

I got Dr. Blakesley's instructions for tweaking my layout and have finished making the preliminary changes he outlined. One of my biggest issues was complicated styles. I renamed them using consistent titles and eliminated my super-specific and unnecessary styles (e.g., "Triple Tabbed Heading after Example Sentences/Passages I). I have also changed my tabbed text to tables, made my graphics and diagrams in-line, and made stylistic changes to chapter titles and running headers.

Denesha and I had no trouble following the guidelines in Castro. We located the metadata, modified the information, and even added the optional guide to the end of the OPF file.

Then we ran into a snag.

This week I completed the first two chapters of my textbook layout and submitted them to Dr. Blakesley for approval/suggestions. To accomplish this I created and tweaked all of my styles as well as generated master pages for each chapter. Initially I placed my images separately from the text frame. However, I moved them inside of the text frames (and placed text inside the objects that appeared behind text) so that they moved/flowed with the rest of the text.

For our first export, Denesha and I did not make any changes to the InDesign file. The text actually exported fairly well. The major issues we saw after our initial export were that some fonts were missing, the table of contents had no links, and all of our images were at the bottom of the text. We also saw some formatting issues that we wanted to change for readability: paragraph spacing, heading styles, alignment.

This week has been a little crazy, so I admittedly have not accomplished as much as I wanted to. However, I am still making progress, and I am still planning to meet my October 17 deadline for the preliminary proof.

I've been identifying elements of the layout and creating styles based on those elements. After finishing the styles, I will need to create master pages based off of my design template. I plan to finish these tasks by Thursday evening and send them to Dr. Blakesley for approval. I hope to get everything flowed into the final book this weekend!