Monday, 20 May 2013

Design context off to print and bind

After a rather intense 48 hours I have finally finished the Indesign document and sent it of to print.  (initially the pagination wasnt working however  had forgot to tick the print blank pages on one of the  menus.)  At least I realised before I sent off.  There were a total of160 pages which make ten sections.  I created a postscript booklet for each range of 16 pages and then saved them as PDFs by opening in Preview.  I then merged the PDFs into a single file ready for print.

This really has been a learning curve from the pagination, page numbering to creating a file that would be correct for printers.

Unfortunately I have already spotted a couple of mistakes but it cant be changed now.

Going forward I plan to email a copy of the book as an interactive PDF, particularly the Studios who answered my survey and also other people who have shown an interest in my dissertation.
For this reason I am going to redesign using a different typeface as although Caslon is 100% great or print it can be quite hard to read online.

I researched the amazing Typophile forum for advise on best Serif fonts for readability.  The verdict is between Garamond, Century Schoolbook, Hoefler and Georgia. So I changed all the typefaces using the find/change in Indesign and did a simple compare on screen  as follows.  (This assumes all recipients will read on a Mac of course)










Caslon was defintitly harder to read than Garamond, the words actually danced whereas Garamond was much easier on the eye.  I think for screen i may go up a point size or two from 10 point.  I tried the other fonts suggested.  Georgia looked a bit clumsy compared to Garamond. it needed more leading.  Hoefler looked too black.  Century School Book again wasn't as easy on the eye.  
From this exercise I have decide to use Garamond for the online version, 11/15.  Also the Univers still works well with this typeface and I wont have to adjust the rest of the layout too much.
  

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