October Custom Publishing Facebook page

I’m building a Facebook Fan Page for October Custom Publishing (my company), in order to try and get us out there a little more. On there you’ll be able to view almost every page of every magazine we’ve either published or been hired to create thus far. I’d really appreciate you becoming a fan, and I’m happy to return the favor! Take a look at the page here. Introduce yourself!

Layout and cover in progress

1/05/09 8:30pm We’ve just had what feels like 6 weeks off for Christmas and Hogmanay, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. Anyway, there have been several rounds of edits like I described in the previous update, with the main InDesign doc going back and forth – along with a PDF – between myself and the editors. I think we only have one more round to go which will happen tomorrow morning, then I can get the whole doc ready to ship to the printer and start working on laying out the cover, which unfortunately has been pushed to the very end of the production cycle again. Luckily, when I send the main document to the printer they have so much to do that it gives me several days to tie up loose ends, design and/or update house ads adn subs forms, and of course layout the cover. The cover design is a multi-step repeating process just like the interior, only it happens much faster – albeit with many more rounds (unless I get lucky, and everyone loves the very first one I put together, which happens once in a blue moon). The photographer is finishing up the high-resolution files now as well, so as long as I receive those tomorrow or the next day, we’re in good shape.

12/30/08 1:30am Ok, kinda lost the thread there for a while with Christmas and all that crap being squeezed in there. So as I mentioned in the previous update, Joel sent me low-resolution jpegs to use for placement in layout. So, I’d gone through a round of edits with the editorial guys on the individual layouts that will comprise the entire magazine – me sending them PDFs and InDesign docs to place edits in, and then having them sent back to me to clean up and make edits they can’t. That included the first-round layouts of the feature well shot by Joel. All those documents were then combined into one massive inDesign file which we call the official round one of edits, which is sent in PDF form to all the editors on staff, and the inDesign doc to one of the editors who will input the majority of their changes, which they supply to him as marked-up PDFs. Following those changes and edits – which sometimes may take three or four days depending on the size of the issue – I’ll work on cleaning up photography that was supplied to us, and tell Joel which images I need cleaned up for final production. I haven’t began to think about the cover yet, but that needs to happen soon as well. Some samples below include the first of two contents pages, the intro page to the whole analog section, and the opening spread of photography (low-resolution, not cleaned up) that opens the main story in the magazine.