Contents page design

There’s a short blog post about contents page design for print magazines – specifically The Absolute Sound magazine – over at this site.

Back at the full-time job, the cover of the latest issue of The Absolute Sound, which is the first one I’ve been really happy with in …well a couple of issues. Really ready to try something completely different with TAS though, give it a bit of a refresh. Couple of previous covers after the jump.

LOCALE magazine project update

Read in the LA Times a while back about an architect who designed his house in order to be able to park his 1984 Ferrari 512 BBi Boxer in his living-room…which led to the idea for a story on out of this world, custom garages. We were lucky enough to be able to get the architect of the Ferrari garage – Holger Schubert of Archisis – to shoot some more images of his house for us. A few more pages from the newest issue after the jump.

Guitar Aficionado Magazine

So I only picked this up because I was counting the magazines in Borders with Jeff Bridges on the cover (there were a lot). It’s completely different from what I was expecting. I thought I was going to see dry, copy heavy, middle of the road layouts with some crappy manufacturer-supplied photography, and a feature well phone interview with Jeff Bridges filled out to 20 pages with whatever publicity stills and photos they could rustle up from the interwebs.

Some recent TAS work…

Some recent work, featuring some particularly awesome photography from Adam Voorhes.

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!

Wish List jersey giveaway

I forgot to mention in the GivingCity 4 post that we’re giving away a Wish List Jersey, the proceeds from which benefit a multitude of charities local and national. From the Wish List site:

A total of 1,600 jerseys have been printed and sold and over $56,000 raised for various charities both local and nationwide including Communities In Schools – Central Texas, The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Susan G. Komen Foundation, The Breast Cancer Fund, American Diabetes Foundation and various AIDS organizations in Dallas, Austin and around the country. People from all over the country and the world are part of the Wish List family. Texas, California, New York, Colorado, Washington D.C., Georgia, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Minnesota, Maryland, Florida, Virginia, Alabama, Utah, South Carolina, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Missouri, Connecticut, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

To win a jersey, download GivingCity Austin magazine issue 4, then go here to enter your password (that you’ll find in the magazine) and comment on the post, telling us why you participate in a ride, run, or walk for the cure – any cause or organization will work, as long as it’s a race that benefits a health-related nonprofit.

GivingCity issue 3 now available for download

UPDATE: Please download the 4th issue here!

Been super busy the past few months and really haven’t had time to update the blog at all. We’re happy that the new issue of GivingCity is now complete (at last!), and we can move on to the next one – and get that one done on time! Please take a look and give me your feedback. Also, please please please send the link to as many people as you can!

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.

Amazing tilt-shift photography video

Looking for an excuse to shoot some products like this.