Ben Crowder

While on the Wikipedia page for the Book of Mormon, I found that Experience Press has made a reprint of the 1830 edition (like Herald Heritage’s 1970 reprint, except these aren’t photo-static images). Browsing further on their site, I found another reprint they’ve done, which looks like this:

Similar, eh? :) It’s a wee bit expensive, though. (But you do get a fairly nice production, as far as the paper and cover and all that go.) There’s a $20 paperback edition as well. The one question I have about the typography (as much as I can judge from that picture) is, what’s up with the extra spaces after semicolons? There doesn’t seem to be much of a margin on the left, either. I won’t hold it against them, since I haven’t seen a real copy, but it’s all the more reason to continue on with Project Cumorah. :)

For my library job interview later today, they asked me to bring a class schedule. Here’s what the schedule looks like online:

Now, being the rabid must-redesign-everythinger I am, I spent half an hour in InDesign and cooked up this beauty:

Mmm, graphic design is fun. :)

I made and uploaded the Japanese Plan of Salvation (救いの計画) today:

It’s about time to start seeking out more translations…

[tags]Plan of Salvation[/tags]

Just a quick update on Project Cumorah for now. I’ve run all the text of the Book of Mormon through my Perl script, and I’ve imported 2 Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, and Words of Mormon into InDesign. Tomorrow I’ll get the rest in and start reparagraphing.

In the meantime, here are two pieces of art I made a while ago. I posted them on Top of the Mountains, but I figure that since this is my art/design blog, I may as well have them here too. (And someday I’ll put up a gallery/portfolio.)

This one’s called “Solitude”:

And this is “Jack’s Beanstalk”:

Both were done in Illustrator.

[tags]Book of Mormon[/tags]

Changed the font in the BoM reader’s edition from Adobe Garamond Pro to Garamond Premier Pro. They’re quite similar, but I like the latter more. (It reminds me a lot of that Penguin Classics font in my editions of War and Peace and Jane Eyre.)

Hmm, I think I need a short project name I can use to refer to this, since “the reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon” is long and unwieldy. Project Cumorah. That works. :)

So, this morning I did some quick copyfitting on Project Cumorah (still on 1 Nephi), which brings me up to the third draft. And I think I’m satisfied, so I can now start typesetting the rest of the book.

I also went over to the copy shop and got 1 Nephi printed out double-sided, then spiral-bound, so I could see what it looks like in a semi-book form. And it looks great! It won’t take long to do the rest — the only parts that take time are reparagraphing and copyfitting, and they’re not that time-consuming. I expect to have the book done by the end of the month, certainly.

[tags]Garamond, Book of Mormon, Penguin Classics[/tags]

I’ve posted the PDF for the Thai script card over at Riverglen Press. One of these days I’ll post PDFs for all the stuff I’ve been working on lately (like the Plan of Salvation bookmarks).

With the Book of Mormon, I moved the font to 11/13pt and reparagraphed it. So now we’re at draft the second. The printers are down, so I can’t see what 11/13 looks like in comparison to 12/14, but I think it’s the right size. (12/14 was kind of big.)

Coming up with titles for these kind of posts is hard. ~sigh~ :)

[tags]Plan of Salvation, Thai, Book of Mormon[/tags]

I finished marking the first-edition paragraphs in my copy of the Book of Mormon and then spent an hour working on 1 Nephi this morning:

It’s still not done, of course. I’m going to go through and revise the paragraphing as I see fit, then copyfit it all so there aren’t ugly orphans and widows all over the place. Overall, though, I’m liking how it’s turning out so far.

I was originally planning on adding quote marks (And the angel said unto me, “Look!”), but the difficulty of the task changed my mind. It’s too hard to tell who’s talking when they quote scripture, and in some cases the quotes go four levels deep. We’ll leave it as it is. :)

Oh, I also changed the logo on here. Much more tolerable than the old one, and it’ll do for now.

[tags]Book of Mormon, Mormon, LDS, Nephi[/tags]

So, I made my first Lulu book today. I’d been meaning to typeset a “real” book, but I realized it would be better to run a test first, so I threw together a 100-page book of font samples which’ll let me see how the various fonts look. From the Lulu paperback printing specifications page I found that it’s on 24/60# Cream Text paper, which makes me happy. :) The only downside is that the cream paper is only available for 6×9″ and 7.5×7.5″ black and white; all the other sizes use white paper. ~sigh~ I’d been hoping to get cream for the pocket size (4.25×6.875″, the size of a normal paperback novel). Maybe the white isn’t as bad as I think. Oh well.

Anyway, the process itself was fairly easy and painless. I created a new project, uploaded my PDF, and all was well. When it came time to upload the cover, I decided to make my own. They give you the specs for the cover size, including spine width (nice :)), but it was unclear how much margin I had (precisely, that is; but maybe my calculations were just off, because the screenshot sure didn’t match what I was expecting), nor did the screenshot mark where the spine was (though it did mark where it’d be cut).

When finished, it came to $6.69 (I didn’t put in any royalty fee). Added one to my cart and checked out. The default shipping selection was UPS Ground, which gave me a little scare at first because it was $8.48 for the shipping alone. Then I realized that I could choose other options, and normal postal mail puts it down at a nice $2.50. The only downside is I have to wait one to three weeks instead of 2-6 business days with UPS. Oh well, it’s not that bad. $9.17 total. I’m excited to see how my book turns out.

Lulu really is a godsend. Here I am, having lots of fun designing books, but they would ordinarily have to remain in PDF form because of prohibitive printing costs. Along comes Lulu, printing on demand, and suddenly not only can I turn my PDFs into real books, but I can also make them available to anyone else who wants them in book form at decent cost. (And no, I don’t have any interest in selling them at profit; I do all this for fun, for the love of the art, not for money.) This is great. :)

Other than that, I’m aching to redesign this site on a grid, but I have too many other projects going on. Soon, hopefully. At least I should just get rid of the awful logo and replace it with something halfway decent.

[tags]Lulu[/tags]

Today I came across Alexander Cheek’s beautiful genealogical history chart. Wow. ~drool~

Here’s an overview:

And here’s a close-up:

He did it in Illustrator CS2 for Mac. Now, this sort of thing really interests me — information display (the sort of thing Tufte writes about) is one of the most intriguing aspects of design. Charts and maps give me goosebumps. :)

A chart like this is a mammoth undertaking. I’m guessing Alexander had to sketch it all out first, to get the spacing right; otherwise he’d have to keep moving things around as the chart grew. Or maybe he went from right to left.

Anyway, my work on Beyond has had me thinking for quite some time now about the display of genealogical information. It’s a fascinating domain, and I suspect there’s room for a lot of innovation.

I can’t help but wonder if there are ways to make the creation of a chart like this easier — automate the placement, or perhaps generate an outline which one can then work from in Illustrator/InDesign (in EPS or whatever). There’s got to be some way so that it doesn’t have to all be done by hand…

[tags]genealogy, charts, Illustrator, InDesign[/tags]

Lately I’ve been working on a number of projects (some of which I’ve already talked about on Top of the Mountains), so here’s the scoop.

I’ve taken the Plan of Salvation look and applied it to bookmarks. I’ll hopefully have a PDF up soon on Riverglen Press:

Next we have the Thai script card I re-did from scratch (in InDesign):

And finally, the wedding invitations I made for my roommate. I used InDesign for the invitations themselves and Blender to make this mockup of what they’ll look like. (They’re printing them in Las Vegas, so I haven’t actually seen the real thing yet. :))

Other than that, I’m going to be trying to finish up my revision of Adventures in Thailand so I can submit it to Lulu and see what the printed copy looks like. (From one of the screenshots on Lulu.com, I think I’ll be happy with it.) I’m mostly concerned about what kind of paper they use. Completely white paper is hard on the eyes, so I prefer off-white — hopefully that’s what they use. :)

[tags]Plan of Salvation, Thai, InDesign, Blender, Lulu[/tags]