Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Tue, May 11, 2010
For three weeks now, I've been working on a blog about color correction for digital and print publications. I think I've developed decent skills in this area during my many years of work in graphic design and production, so I thought I could provide some tips readers might appreciate when left to fend for themselves while producing a publication.
I began by wrestling with ways to describe how to attain accurate reproduction of original artworks and display their images consistently across a variety of media. This brought me to consider the astonishing range of displays on which people can presently view the same, single image, and how widely color and contrast is likely to shift with each of those displays. Always developing printing capabilities skew things even further.
Then I considered how millions of people, like me, spend hours in front of computers, being deluged by countless images. When you contend with that kind of visual saturation on a daily basis, the only chance an image has to grab your attention is if there is something really wrong with it. Even then, I expect that such an egregious error would also need to be engaging enough to keep the viewer from scrolling and clicking.
As you can see, color correction had taken a back seat to a consideration of what it presently means to look at art.
On the print side, my company produces catalogs for museum exhibitions and collections as well as other kinds of books that deal with fine art and architecture. We share with our photographers, production managers, prepress techs, and printers the responsibility for controlling consistency and delivering accurate reproduction. While there is much room for error, the variables are manageable, and we all have the common goal of producing an accurate printed page. At every step along the way, we spend a great deal of time comparing and adjusting each piece in order to provide readers with a collection of images with which they will also want to spend time.
Lately, we have been considering how the great shift from print to digital publishing will affect our niche market of fine art publishing, and how best to utilize these new, always evolving technologies. We've met with firms that adapt picture-driven books to e-book format. To date, the most successful of these are instructional titles (e.g., cooking, craft, and DIY books and magazines). But, chances are that the reader who spends time studying specific images or text in such books is doing so to clear up confusion about the subject rather than out of appreciation for the pictures.
I'd really like to know if some people would prefer to study a fine art reproduction on a monitor rather than on the printed page. I expect there are many who do, and no doubt I will find their reasons surprising.
I recently talked with a gallery owner who specializes in contemporary and vintage silver print photographs. We talked about how the tiny, rarified market for fine art photography books continues to shrink. He suggested that the flood of digital images that has become available to everyone, everywhere could cause people to forget the pleasures of viewing photographic prints "in the flesh," which could easily lead to a wholesale loss of interest in attending photography exhibits at galleries or museums. An excessively gloomy forecast, perhaps, but it does cause me to wonder if we are all progressively losing our capacity for sustained visual attention.
Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Fri, Mar 05, 2010
I am very fortunate to be able to design and produce wonderful illustrated books on painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and architecture for museums as well as university and commercial publishers. I also take great pleasure in perusing a thoughtfully designed book-with-pictures, appreciating the pacing and rhythm of its layout and how text and art refer to and enhance each other.
In my work I strive to provide the viewer with text that is both easy to read and scan for specific information, as well as presenting pictures that one can scan with ease; taking in its surface or boundaries or finding its compositional (or metaphoric) focus.
Of course, all this suggests my preference for holding a book in my hands, scanning spreads from left to right, and turning pages. This experience may be destined for obsolescence, and at Vern Associates we are cautiously adapting our work to accommodate the insistent shift from print-on-paper to digital books.
One seldom visits a site or reads a blog that doesn't supplement its text with video. This is what most people have come to expect from an interactive medium, and video can convey a great deal of information effectively and persuasively. It is a boon for those looking for information on how to do something, because you can watch someone demonstrate the task. I'm more skeptical of sites that combine text with talking heads who instruct, coach, sell, or what have you.
I recently visited two publishing sites that sell hybrid book-and-video titles and found that they to relate to each other in unexpected ways.
Vook is a web-based application that partners with magazine and book publishers to produce highly interactive digital books that you can access on PCs, digital readers, or mobile phones. These vooks include both text and video, along with links to social media sites. Some titles, such as those about cooking and fitness are a good fit for this format. Fiction titles often include dramatized versions of the story, alongside the text. Another discovery was the children's and Y-A author Patrick Carman's Skeleton Creek series (Scholastic). Carman wrote an interesting piece in Publisher's Weekly about his successful series that gets kids really interested in reading.
These stories are presented as text followed by video and so on. This video carrot works really well in making the written word much less of a stick. In the Skeleton Creek books, kids must finish reading before they get to the movie. I don't think that would fly with customers downloading novels from Vook.
The voices in my head
I've never mentioned this to anyone—nor had reason to, until now—but when I read, I "hear" the words in my own voice. My voice is modulated depending on the topic. It is very nondescript when I am calculating figures in a math text, and can get quite dramatic for fiction, a higher pitch for female characters, an appropriate accent for English or French or Bostonian characters. It seems to me that these sounds become an integral part of how I comprehend the written word, make it part of my memory, and classify its value. More important, my internal voice is my first step to visualizing the images and situation being described. I'd like to think that other people share this experience while reading. If not, they must have other means of processing words and internalizing stories. I don't understand how the same degree of comprehension is possible from watching a scripted, filmed, and edited version of that same story, but would love to know if other people share my opinion.
Posted by Peter Blaiwas on Fri, Jan 08, 2010
First, I turn 53 this month. So do my eyes.
Then, too, I design and lay out illustrated books for a living. Textual balance, ease of use, and readability--including sufficient contrast from brightness of page to variety of thicknesses in the strokes of each letterform--are all extremely important to me. I dislike reading endless lengths of minimally formatted text and scrolling through undifferentiated paragraphs with no rhythm or pacing.
I believe that the Internet developed as an interactive tool that was required to do too many things fast (and well), so readability was not given a high priority. As a result, most legibility basics (e.g., the aforementioned contrast, or care given to typographic choices) need to be reconsidered for electronic text. When I read a book, for example, I don't shine my reading lamp into my eyes, so it stands to reason that I won't be happy if light emanates out toward me from behind the text I'm reading.
There is also the issue of scrolling up and down as opposed to reading left to right and then turning a page. To date, presenting text on a screen has followed the basic "universal" assumption that real estate on a monitor is always at a premium. This makes scrolling the most logical and efficient means of progressing through text. So, even though a vast number of the world's readers have fallen in line behind this essential compromise, I think it's time to look at the bigger picture. Five and a half centuries of reading practices really needn't crumble in the face of the two or three decades over which online content has developed.
For one's eyes, turning a page provides a brief, natural, and essential break from the concentration required to read. Like blinking, this unremarkable activity has the capacity to offer our hardworking eyes the frequent and necessary pauses they need. Many of the newspapers that have developed online "readers" have recognized this, and they seem to have had the most success in negotiating with the realities of the monitor in creating more reader-friendly environments.
Of the many technological advances in digital publishing over the last decade, the advent of the portable document format (pdf) has brought about a major shift in how print publications are edited, designed, and produced. The potential savings in time and costs (shipping and paper) and the jump in efficiency were immediately apparent. Almost as quickly, the pdf became the new standard for proofing print publications.
I am aware that only a tiny fraction of the constant stream of innovations in information technology directly affects my work (and perhaps my interests), and that my use of such advances barely scratches the surface. My appreciation of Adobe's latest innovations is likely always to be analogous to the Indian story of
the blind men and the elephant. I welcome anyone to fill me in on how I can become a pdf "power-user" and resolve the issues addressed in the following critique:
The pdf encapsulates the digital image, layout, page, or manuscript, and thus essentially mimics the "permanence" of the printed page. It is also the most comfortable way I have found to read content on a monitor. For that reason, I think this format has the potential to become the most effective means of bridging the gap (or chasm?) between publishing content digitally and actually reading it onscreen.
Presently, we create pdfs for our clients so they can review layouts of individual chapters from the illustrated books we produce for them. We reduce their length like this because electronic files containing an entire book are too large, and the redraw rate too slow, even when file size is significantly reduced and art compressed.
Adobe Acrobat functions primarily as an "artifact" display, despite its useful editing and proofing tools. Its GUI for sequential documents has always been ungainly. In my opinion, pdfs should be the display of choice for electronic books, particularly illustrated ones. Retooling Acrobat (or developing new spinoff applications) in partnership with e-book developers with the goal of recreating the experience of reading a print publication is the best bet for this nascent industry. But, then, perhaps their primary goal is making reading more fully interactive--which may only offer the reader more distractions--rather than efficient or comfortable?
Posted by Brian Hotchkiss on Fri, Sep 25, 2009
No sooner had I posted my first blog on print publication vs. ebooks, than I came across "On the Ropes?" a terrific article in PW by Robert Darnton, historian of the book, erudite writer, and director of the Harvard Library system. The tagline reads, in part: "Darnton says reports of the book's death are greatly exaggerated." Had I seen this prior to titling my previous blog, I would have found some other way to introduce it. But, I didn't, and on reconsidering, I am just as glad. If someone whose opinion I admire so much is connected with these musings, who am I to object? I can't wait to read his new book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (soon to be published by PublicAffairs).
Posted by Brian Hotchkiss on Wed, Sep 23, 2009
This is a truly auspicious time for Vern Associates to initiate our blog. You see, on October 4, 2009, VAI will celebrate its fifteenth anniversary!
A little more than a year before Peter and I founded Vern Associates, an illustrated-book producer, I spent a day meeting with curators and publications people at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The word on virtually everyone’s lips—often uttered in a hushed, tentative, but excited voice—was Internet. They all seemed to be discovering and exploring a new “thing.” I finally ventured the question, What is the Internet? Instead of snorting and looking at me like I was some sort quaint throwback to an earlier age, I got a half-dozen detailed explanations, few of which agreed with any other.
Several times that day I was asked, Are you on email? Assuming they were referring to the interoffice electronic message system we had at Little, Brown, I said I thought I was. Although I didn’t tell them so, however, I couldn’t figure out why they cared.
Within a year, I was meeting with Time Warner’s newly hired “electronics guy,” who had been brought in to help figure out just how the various publishing subsidiaries of TW could leverage the new technology. He was very smart, very enthusiastic, and didn’t last long. Not because he wasn’t capable, but because he read the handwriting so clearly scrawled across the wall: “This will never affect book publishing.” He left for a position within the computer industry fold that permitted him to work on figuring out how to “assist” publishers who wanted to enter this not-so-brave, new world.
I also recall the great expectations Peter and I—and the vast majority of our colleagues—had for the printed book. Maybe they weren’t expectations so much as assumptions: books would always comprise printed words and pictures on paper, which was then bound and sold in bookstores. Hmmm.
Just today, while visiting the website of the proposed Boston Museum, I read this: “Text book publishers predict the disappearance of the printed text, perhaps within a decade.” Yikes! Could they mean all books? Maybe they’re referring to textbooks alone? As has happened so many times over the past 15 years, I confronted the prediction that leaves me wondering just what it means to people whose livings depend on making books.
To be honest, I keep pretty close tabs on what publishers say on this subject—granting most of what I hear its requisite grain of salt. This was the first time I have heard from a publisher this dire a prediction of the imminent finitude of books as we know them. Even those most focused on the future of publishing don’t expect books to exit totally, either with a bang or a whimper.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, 15 years seemed an eternity. Not so much, anymore. As Vern Associates strides into the blogosphere, we are confronted once again with the need to adjust our views of publishing and books and to examine just what our working lives will look like over the next 15 years.