I know, it’s gone a bit quiet over here.  Some of that’s just your normal gearing back up for the new year – everyone’s back to work, things are getting a little busier, there’s a little rush of jobs need clearing out of my inbox, etc.

Some of that’s me having started on some New Ideas that aren’t yet to a point where I have anything to show, yet.  I’ve dropped a few hints here and there about my thought processes lately, and readers of Warren’s site will have seen the day I dropped him five very long emails in a row (I’m scheming!) – I’m just at the point in that process where anything I have to say is going to be pages and pages and pages of theory and braindump… and some of you might not mind trying to unravel all of that, sure – but I haven’t the time to do it and to write it all down.

But! It’s Monday, and IEU is  over our holiday hiatus, so we’re back with a new TOTW!

 

Not a bad way to start the day, that.

Hello, New Year. There’s so many lovely metaphors for you: you’re like the first page of a fresh empty notebook, the first brush-stroke on a newly-stretched canvas, an empty plot of land just tilled for a new crop, the first needle-loop of a new skein of yarn, and all the other sorts of things you can start with old tools and known skills and a bit of something new to use them on.

Which is the sane way of stating what the cynics in the room (which I’m only ever accused of being when people don’t like my jokes, haha) will have said at midnight:  It is, after all, just the day after last year.

Optimists and pessimists and soon-to-be pessimistic optimists are all flippity flopping about how 2010 will be better or worse or just the same as 2009.  Of course, from where I’m sitting, it’s already better: today’s weather is just a touch warmer than yesterday’s, a little bit of nagging elbow pain faded overnight with some ibuprofen (and that same pressure change that brought the weather, likely), and people have started saying “twenty” instead of “two thousand” – so that’s three points to 2010, just in my first ten hours of it.

But, yes, of course – there are bound to be colder days again, this elbow is a chronic condition, and some people will I’m sure, continue to say “two thousand” for as long as we’re in it.  You pessimists and already-broke-your-resolution-and-so-shortly-joining-them optimists can stop reading now, warm in the assurance that my 2010 may look better but it certainly can’t last.

Silly kids.

Everyone that’s still here, lemme start with the good news: 2010 is going to be better than 2009.  Honestly.  This is based not on some vague feeling or gambler’s fallacy, but on absolute fact: lately I’ve only been on about one thing – making things, and how, and just get ‘er done – and if you’re still here reading me, it’s because that’s what you want to do.  And if that’s what you’ve decided to do, then 2010 can’t help but be better than last year, when you didn’t.  Can (and will) things go wrong?  Yeah.  They can.  And will.  I’m not going to lie to you. And that possi-probability for disaster is the bad news, sure.  But that’s no worse than it’s ever been, so there’s really no need to dwell on that.  All you need remember is that this is the year you decided to Do More Stuff, and so loong as you don’t sabotage yourself, there’s no reason why you won’t.

Eventually.  But very probably this year.  Barring that self-sabotage thing.

Take a look at this pretty little site I found this morning: My Someday. It’s yet another to-do/goal/planning network amongst the gajillion others already online.  I’m not endorsing this particular site over any of the other apps/widgets/sites/etc that already do much the same thing, I just liked the timing of it (it is a rather New Year’s sort of site, innit?)… and it reminded me of something that’s a good thing to remember any time, but especially on January First, while we’re thinking about it.  A little copy paste from the site:

For each Someday, we’ll show you related step-by-step Plans for achievement. You can copy and customize a Plan or build your own.

[. . .]

Help others by posting a Plan with the steps you used to achieve your Someday.

There you go.  Don’t forget those bits, yeah?  I’m not saying sign up for yet another site (although if it floats your boat, then go right ahead. I can already see little mini-nets piggybacking on the service), what I’m saying is that achieving, making, doing anything does require some sort of plan.  And it needn’t actually be that detailed – god knows I make shit up all the time – but parceling your plan into easily managed (and swappable/changeable when necessary) modules never hurts.

And that second part is what I do here, sometimes, and what I always like seeing from other people: there is, again, no harm in lending a hand to other folks that want to make things, too.  There are very few actual trade secrets, in any trade. More often there are just folks that are terrified that if they tell someone how to install a word-processing program, those other folks will finish their books, first.  Which is a ridiculous and, worse, lonely way to work.  It’s worth noting that when you make friends by helping them learn how to do their things, you’re not usually making competitors – you’re making a network of folks that may very well be your first customers, sure, but will certainly be your first supporters.  And that second bit, support, is something you’re not going to succeed without, period.

Of course, don’t give yourself away completely – unless your goal is to become an advice columnist, you can’t spend all your time giving advice.  But there’s a lot to be said, as you all start your new years and your new projects (well, for some of you, that might come after your new hangover, sure, but you know what I mean), about how you’re going to exchange information in 2010.  If you’ve got things you’re going to need to learn how to do to get your thing done, chances are other folks do, too.  It won’t hurt for you to ask, and it won’t hurt for you to offer, either. 

That little segue done, let’s circle back to the start of this post: I can’t honestly say how the year’s going to play out all across the board, but I feel pretty good about mine, and I’ve got a hunch yours is going to turn out all right, too. 

So welcome along in 2010, thank you for reading, and let’s see how it goes, shall we?

God, I really hate that title.  Because it shouldn’t be what this comes down to.  That really should be a bit like saying Apples vs. Pears (because they aren’t quite as dissimilar as pomes and citrus, but they certainly aren’t the same) – only for the purposes of my ongoing “getting started with POD” series, it turns out that, yeah, Cafepress is probably a much better bet than Imagekind.

Which is a damned shame.  Cafepress just don’t offer quite the same quality as Imagekind, nor some of the nice customization options like shape, paper choices, and frames and mats.  So for the really fine artists in the room, I’m kinda saying “sorry, you’re screwed” for one-off works.  But Imagekind just aren’t quite set up for one-offs and beginners, not really.  They’re more of an in-between option for artists that are already shipping and printing their stuff, and want to move to a more automated system, but aren’t ready for a full-time storefront of their own.

The single biggest hurdle for any artist in any medium, starting out, is building momentum.  When you first open a Cafepress or a Lulu shop, you may only make a couple of sales that first month.  That’s just one of those things, you know?  It might take you two, maybe even three months to hit that minimum $25 revenue required for them to cut your first check.  For a book on Lulu (the smartest service out there, frankly), you’ve only got to hit a $5 minimum to get your first PayPal transfer.  And, no, hell no we’re not talking making a living with $25 or $5 check, are we?  But we are talking about results – and when you’re starting out?  Those first tiny checks… well they fucking mean something, and rightly so, don’t they?  You spend that first $5 from Lulu on a celebratory cup of coffee, because you earned it, goddamnit, and it tastes good.

It’s the little things that build and build until, a year later, you’re looking back on that first check and laughing – but you still remember it.

Imagekind, on the other hand, sets the first check (even with the PayPal option and search me as to why, it’s not like it costs them that much in processing fees) at $50.

Think about that for a second.  $50.  To a new artist, trying to build an audience, maybe only marking things up a buck just to get their stuff out there, that could take anywhere up to six months.  And let’s be honest – how many people do you think completely lose momentum waiting for that first $50 to clear?  Right.  Or maybe they do make $60 that first month… followed by a frustrating four months of $47 more dollars that, let me tell you, would buy a lot of ramen. But it may as well not even be there, and I’ll bet you $50 that there are hundreds of abandoned Imagekind accounts permanently locked at somewhere between $10 and $49.  Which isn’t so bad for the company, I guess – but you can bet none of those sellers are recommending the service to their friends.

Which probably explains why Imagekind have a couple thousand twitter followers, and Cafepress, Lulu, and even Zazzle are all closer to ten grand each.

The shame of it is that Imagekind and Cafepress are apparently under the same umbrella, and besides the difference in payout minimums, Cafepress are a much more intuitive backend, too.  Some of that is just the difference between multiple products and one basic product in different sizes, but some of that’s just weird intent on the part of the interface developers, I think.  (And I really wish there were a bit more integration between the two services than some confusing links out on Cafepress and the Cafepress logo on the Imagekind header.  But that’s a pretty common scenario in the wake of early ‘00s buy-outs, and doesn’t really factor into this review.)

And (and Cafepress is no good at this, either, but) is it really that hard to set up a markup settings page where totals update as you type in the markup, instead of having to save, close, reopen, check the totals, and save again?  I might just have been spoiled by Lulu and Zazzle, but man would that save some time and headache.

But, again, I think Imagekind are set up for people that already have a system, prices, etc, and just want to transfer that to an online system with offsite fulfillment.

I do want to say very nice things about whoever is running Imagekind’s twitter account – within moments of my tweet mentioning them and the word “difficult,” they responded to me. And not in that creepy twitterbot sort of way, they actually followed up after. So someone at the company is clearly engaging with the public, and that goes a long way for my opinion of a company.  And I’ve seen the quality of their prints (very nice), and have nothing but good things to say about their costs and fulfillment.  Like I say, as a solution for someone that wants to move selling prints out of their office and stop stuffing envelopes themselves?  Sure thing – Imagekind are probably one of the better online solutions out there (before you get into the really high-volume fulfillment centers and print shops).

But for the people that have been asking me where they can go to start out – to test the waters of online print sales?  I really think I have to recommend Cafepress’ posters.  You’re only going to get three size options (medium, large, and whoa), and one paper and not the best quality… but you can branch out the products you offer, and you’re going to get your first check before you run out of steam.  And believe me, I know how big a deal that is, and how much that little bit of encouragement goes to keeping the creativity going.  And that keeping yourself going and making new things is how you’re going to make  2010 the year you finally start Really Making Things, isn’t it just?

But, sure, for the Getting There artists and photographers that are at that in-between point where you’ve got people asking you all the time for prints, and you’re looking at getting your own printers and postage but that seems just out of reach, yet – Imagekind may be right for you. I know a bunch of the pros in the room just gasped a bit, at that – and, honestly, they’re right to do so.  If you can afford (and your business is at the point where it makes sense) to do your own printing and shipping, you are going to make more money once you pay off your set-up costs.  But setting up with a service that handles printing and fulfillment is a good halfway step that can pay for that fancy gajillion dpi printer, and make sure that’s the route you want to take.  And, you know, if time is a huge factor (if you’re still rocking the day job and trying to market prints, too) that’s another consideration.

So too if you’ve been doing prints for a while, but you’re only really pulling in a hundred or so a month, and you really just want to phase out the envelope stuffing in favor of some bigger and more time consuming project.  Something like Imagekind is probably a great way to keep up the quality (again, they really are nice prints) and quantity of your print sales, while putting some of your time into something else.

For me, I’m not too disappointed that my own Imagekind account is very likely going to be one of those abandoned accounts with (well) less than $50.  Sometime around or after the New Year I may move some Venn stuff over to a Cafepress store if folks ask for it (EDIT:  Why the hell not?), but like I said a couple posts back, I was more looking for an excuse to try Imagekind out and post about them than anything – so no great loss to me.  (Although, for the Venn image, I won’t be doing Cafepress posters, just because their size options don’t suit the image, so I will leave the Imagekind print shop up – it’s not like there’s any reason to close it. *Edited, see end of post.) For any future (real) projects, though: no, I don’t think they’ll find a home with anything fancier than Cafepress.

But I did get a nice long post out of the experiment and, if I’m lucky, I saved some of you some time or at least gave you a good chunk of info to add to your own toolboxes, yeah?  And that’s what it’s about.

(And, you know, I did get a couple Art and Science Venns out into the wild, too, and that still makes me grin, hehe, thank you!)

---

*Edit: Bradley Schenck (Who would know better than I would, as he’s been doing this for years.  I know you’ve seen his lovely RETROPOLIS merchandise, which I’ve been enamored with since I saw it a linked couple of years ago on… some site. Maybe a Project Wonderful ad?   Regardless, it’s good stuff, and you should go take a look if you haven’t) sent me an email this morning to correct my “only three sizes” comment about Cafepress:

I’ve been following your POD posts, and I have an observation about the latest one.  You mention that Cafepress posters come in only three sizes: but the way it actually works is that those three sizes are each a *maximum* size, and the poster can be trimmed to any size smaller than that.
So, for example: if you create an image that’s the right resolution and aspect ratio for an 18 x 24" poster, you create a new "Large Poster".  Its *maximum* size is 23" x 35".  Then you add the image to your new poster product, and select the correct image height from a dropdown list.  If you then select "No Border" from the next dropdown, the system knows that the poster should be trimmed to 18 x 24".
This has had bugs from time to time, but it seems to be working now – with the minor annoyance that the product image and thumbnail are smaller than they should be, because blank space is left in the image for the trimmed margin.

Which I had completely missed on my first look at the Cafepress poster templates, so thanks, Bradley! There’s one more point to Cafepress.

(EDIT:  Much of this post refers to an Imagekind Store that’s no longer active.  You can read about my Imagekind thoughts, here.  Suffice to say, I couldn’t find a single reason not to move the image to a Cafepress store — I even found a comparable print size for close to the same price — and now, what the hell, I can offer mugs, too! )

The Venn diagram of Art and Science – the actual image of a circle with nothing outside the overlap – came to me before the rest of the post.  While I was setting the type and measuring out the negative space in photoshop, I was talking through the rest of the conversation in my head.  I do that fairly often, actually – while I’m fiddling with a visual I’m thinking through the conversation, and vice versa.  And I thought it turned out simple and pretty enough that I’ll likely use it as a header when I revisit the idea a little later on.  I’ve gotten such positive feedback – and some really great follow-up questions – that I don’t think I’m done talking about it.

But I was most surprised when @jdaysy on twitter asked if I’d offer a print of the image, because she’d already printed out a low-res version to tack up on the wall.

Because, okay, that’s really just neat, isn’t it?  It’s one thing to think to myself this could be a conversation piece, because if I’m just absolutely wrong, well, it’s just a moment online.  It’s something completely different and wonderful when someone else – someone I didn’t even know until twitter linked us up – says “hey, this is something I’d like to have as a conversation piece in the real world.”

But my first answer was: No, I hadn’t really thought about it – because I don’t really have a set-up to offer prints, and mailing things out seems like something I don’t really want to work into my already busy schedule, and who knows if enough people would want a copy to justify a print run and…

And then I remembered that I’ve been on about POD for months now, and I even spent some time last month trying to convince a very good artist on twitter that he should be offering prints off his portfolio because there’s no real risk involved if you go with something like Imagekind (a Cafepress company).  And I’d even been meaning to get a crack at the seller side of the service for possible upcoming projects of the Mad Science variety (and so I could write about it for the visual artists that read along over here).

And just to give me that extra little kick in the pants, I got another little flurry of links and positive feedback when @jennybmurphy passed the link to the post on to @badastronomer (thank you both!) and several people said nice things about the post – but a few people linked the image.

So, okay, yes.  Absolutely.  The idea of having my simple little print tacked up above easels and lab tables and computers and whatever else – maybe perpetuating the conversation out into the world – that’s so nifty I just can’t say no.  Especially when all the work left on my end – since I already had a .psd on my desktop – was scaling the image up to print resolution and uploading it to an Imagekind account.

So, it may not make it in time for the holidays, since we’re at the tail end of shipping deadlines, but if you’ve got a little extra xmas money kicking around and you want a high quality print in whatever workspace you’ve got, I would be absolutely thrilled if you want one of these:

Either later today or tomorrow (we’ll see what my schedule allows), I’m going to do a write up on using Imagekind for those of you that want to make prints of your own.  Most of my POD talking lately has been books and tees (and mugs, etc), and I know there are a few of you that work at finer resolutions than Cafepress or Lulu (black and white) are good for, or that don’t have enough photos, for instance, to do a full photobook on Lulu or magazine through Magcloud, but would be interested in offering prints – so I’m happy that I might have some useful tools for you, too.

But while I’m working on that, I’d love it if you’d link and twitter this around for me a bit, and thank you in advance.  I’d also really like if the photographers and artists start thinking about what prints you’d like to offer, if you don’t already – because how brilliant will it be if I help more people make pretty things that I can put on my walls?  I’ve got this print right around the $15 range for the three small-to-medium sizes just because I really do just want to get them out there (I’m serious!  Send me pictures of it up in your workspace if you get one! I’m totally linking every shot I get, here.), and there are greeting cards for $3.99 if you want to put one in a picture frame on your desk on the very cheap.  But I do think $20-$30 would be more than fair for your photographs or fine art prints, so that’s something for you to start thinking about, yeah? 2010 wants to see your work out in the world, too.

Thank you!

(NB: if you look at the little countdown thingama in my sidebar, you’ll see this one’s running until MONDAY to make up for today’s lateness)

Sometimes, it works like this:

Warren and I were discussing two potential T-shirts of the Week (both of which we’ll likely get to later, so you get no more detail than that) when he offhandedly added, “I thought about SCROTUMPUNK but…” – and I’m not sure what he said after the “but” because that’s when I stopped listening, cleared off whatever else I’d been working on, and threw together the first draft of what you see up there at the top before he could go back to talking about the other two designs.

And then we both cackled a little hysterically for several minutes, because sometimes this project is really just the most fun, ever.

At some point in the design process, Warren realized in a moment of absolute brilliance that we really needed to work a pressure-release valve into the works. Obviously.  And my mock had that umlaut in a separate hidden layer from the beginning, because I thought it was perfect, but I wasn’t sure if that was just, you know, my own madness.  But as we were wrapping the design, he said, “I feel like we should put an umlaut over the…” – and, again, I’m not sure how that sentence ended because that was good enough for me, so I rushed into the image and toggled the layer visible before he could have second thoughts.

So, sometimes, yes, TOTW is a delicate process of creating a subtle design to show off a clever chunk of text.  But sometimes it’s a few glorious minutes of being fully invested in the absolute wrongness of the endeavor.

And you know you love it.

Working on the TOTW projects with Warren is one of those things that can go one of two ways: Either I get to go a bit mad having fun with over-executing a simple concept (as with SPACE BASTARD), or Warren’s been so clever that I really couldn’t fuck up the design unless i really tried.

This week I accidentally really tried to fuck it up.

What you see above is actually the second incarnation of this week’s design.  In the first attempt, in my fried-from-a-crazy-week state,  I completely ignored my general let-the-content-do-the-talking rule, and went a bit stupid with the execution.  And it looked… all right, I suppose.  But even as I was showing it to Warren, I didn’t think it was really what we wanted.  So I said, you know, it’s cute and all, but let me take a day to work on this pile of other stuff and I’ll give it another go later.

(Which is why it’s sometimes a really good idea to have a pile of other stuff wanting your attention.  Because sometimes it’s a good thing to take a break from one project – so long as you’ve got something else to keep your fingers moving and your gears turning.)

A day later, when I came back to it, it hit me like the proverbial ton of feathers: Oh wait, this is just funny as it is, I don’t have to fuss around with making it busy and ridiculous.  And in about 15 minutes I’d sketched out a layout, picked a typeface, slid everything into place, and tada that’s how you do that.

My design process for a tee on Cafepress is (usually) not so different than the process was for (Happy()Sad), even though the finished products are different. Cafepress use a heat transfer system which is, in essence, printing out an RGB image on a CMYK machine onto heat-transfer paper and then ironing it on to cloth. (Happy()Sad) is a three-color screen print, which means that each ink is placed on the shirt individually.  That’s why, with Cafepress, you can print a photo onto a t-shirt or mug, but screen-printed tees usually have one to eight solid colors. 

But, with the exception of FUCKABLE ZOMBIE (and even with that one, I stayed within one shade range which, having worked with RGB to CMYK for some many years now, I knew would look good in final print), I tend to stick with solid colors and thicker line-widths.

Why?

Because that’s a very good guideline with any POD service (whether it’s prints, tees, or books): the less fussy you make it, the better it’s going to look.

From anything other than an inch away, a solid black circle is going to look (close enough) as crisp on a heat press as is on a screen print.  The folks that will argue with that are, technically, correct, but the difference is the same as Mp3s and Oggs – as long as you’re aware of the near-lossless range, you can do pretty damned well with both.  It’s not until you break out of that range that you get toppy on an Mp3, and it’s not until you start fussing with a million colors that  you get sketchy on tees.  Likewise, while the interior text of POD books is, at this point, flat gorgeous, I’ve detailed before that interior B&W photos are not perfect, and your cover restrictions tend to top out at 300dpi.

(Anyone who works with big, broad colors isn’t too worried about 300dpi, but the comics and other lineart artists in the room probably just shuddered, just a little.)

So, when working with POD services (and this will probably remain true for the next 5 or so years, at least): it’s best to design within the range of the upload options.  Which, for Cafepress, means thinking about what 200dpi means.  200dpi does not mean ugly – I mean, you’re reading this at 72dpi, so 200 gives you a lot more leeway.  But it does mean that a delicately fussy image with a lot of lines or shades or whatever else is not going to be as well served by going on a t-shirt as it even would by being printed out on your home laser printer.  Because not only are you working at 200dpi, you’re working at 200dpi on cloth, which is not a nice, smooth surface like paper.

This is where my suggestion of standing up and walking away from your monitor to take a look from a distance is particularly helpful, not just for cover design, but for everything and especially clothing.  Because that’s when you’re going to notice that your smallish, slender type is illegible.  That’s also when you’re going to notice that million-color photograph has just kinda turned into a meaningless blob. 

And, going back to the beginning of all of this: that’s  sometimes when you’re going to realize that what started out as a funny block of text has just kinda turned into a complicated jumble of… stuff.  Good design isn’t always about making something look good – sometimes it’s about making sure something that’s already good doesn’t get overwhelmed by trying to dress it up.

So two somewhat unrelated concepts – don’t overwhelm your content with your design, and keep in mind the constraints of your printing process – are covered by one universal guideline: don’t overdo it.  Do precisely what it takes to get your design across, and then stop right there – because at that perfect point, anything else you add is just going to start weighing your design down with unnecessary clutter. 

And, you know, when you know you’re at that point when you’re just dressing up a pig, put it down and come back to it later.  No sense in going blind spending hours and hours trying to perfect something right now, not when you could spend those hours working on something else, and finish this one up in 15 minutes when you’re fresh.

Several people have asked: “What font should I use for my book?”  And I haven’t got a clue, really.  That’s going to differ case by case, book by book, author by author, audience by audience.  But I thought I’d take a look over at the always excellent I Love Typography blog to see if John had any more specific advice.  And it turns out he’s written up an entire post On Choosing Type, tada.

Alas, the first paragraph of it is absolute nonsense to anyone with free-turning gray-matter – for those of us that don’t have a hard line between our left and right brains the statements “Art can’t be Science” or “Science can’t be Art” are a bit narrow and uninformed.  But that aside, it’s all very good advice, some of which you’ll already have seen here (Print out and  read the thing! Consider your audience and intent!).

So yes, there’s very good advice on picking your type that you should go read.  But for those of you that don’t necessarily feel like Artists (and this applies to every bit of design, from colors to fonts to paper to art), don’t you worry: Always remember that SCIENCE! isn’t the cold, dead thing that people that don’t understand it accuse it of.  SCIENCE! is any knowledge base or practice that allows for repeatable and predictable results.  We make our own SCIENCE!, every day, whether we’re smashing atoms together or knitting socks.  Artists use trial and error, too.  Whatever you’re trying to Make, you just give it a go and keep at it until it’s right.  Don’t you ever let anyone put you off by saying “You can’t learn to do this, you just have to know.”

Just get it done, learn from your mistakes, and apply those lessons to the next thing you do.  That’s SCIENCE!  And it’s its own art.

I’ve got about a million deadlines today, so I’m doing this up at a dead run – mostly just to get some thoughts down here, open up the topic, get some preliminary feedback, ramble a bit and get it out of my brain.

A bit of mandatory prefacing, first: I’ve got no arguments against digital editions in general.  In fact, the only arguments against I’ve been able to find anywhere seem to come down to the twin chestnuts of “Piratez!” and “DRM!”  And since one of those is a vague and winding bit of ultimately kinda crazy-talk and the other is more a type than a yes or no, neither is terribly useful for this particular conversation.

Second, I’m not on about dedicated e-books.  In other words, there’s about a million reasons to or not to release content first or exclusively as a digital download.  In those cases, it’s a (as good as it gets) clear-cut case of picking a format, and that’s a somewhat different thought process.  That’s really many of the same decisions that inform publishing a book at all, and we can talk about those later.

The titular question of this post is really this: If you’re publishing a book (and I’ll be working off the Lulu dataset here, again, as that’s what I’ve got), should you also take advantage of Lulu’s simultaneous digital download release format?

And the answer, as far as I can see, is: Well, it really doesn’t seem to hurt anything.

Which is weird, right?  I’m very used to the pros and cons of a system lining up to a solid Yes! or No!  Not an Eh, may as well.  But that really does seem to be where we are (again, with Lulu’s options).

Some of that comes down to the how of publishing a digi-edition (essentially a PDF) with Lulu. I kind of randomly twittered the other day something like “until e-books take advantage of the format, they’re going to be ‘just like’ books.” With the Lulu system, that’s very true: basically whatever you upload (or use their templates to make) can either be printed or downloaded.  But it’s going to be the exact same file, either way.  The only difference is going  to be that a print order is going to be printed, and a download is not.

(And of course, price and a few other details, but we’ll get to those in a sec.)

I am aware of (and thrilled by) some publishers, particularly of technical books, taking advantage of the differences between paper and digital content.  Things as simple as a Table of Contents with links that take you directly to the section with a click.  You can’t do that with paper, but you can do that with a PDF (or a .mobi or .azw or whatever).  Same with inline links that either take you somewhere else within the document, or simply pop up a definition of a technical term.  Or even out of the document to wikipedia or some other web page, although that begins to rely on an external connection and browser of some sort, so now we’re moving to connectivity instead of encapsulated content.

Point is, there’s a lot you can do with a digital format to make it something different than a book.  But many POD publishers aren’t set up (or don’t make it easy) to take advantage of those possibilities.  And, really, if you’re just publishing a manuscript, you’d be tasked with doing a lot of extra work to take advantage of those possibilities, too.

So, for the moment, we put aside all of the things digital format can do, and we come back around to the question: I’ve you’ve got a book all queued up to print via Lulu, should you tick the little box that makes it available for download, too?

Warren and I just pushed the downloadable version of Shivering Sands live.  If you hit that link, now, you’ll see that there’s the option right from the storefront to stick a print or download version in your cart.  Why did we decide to offer a download?  Well… mostly because people asked for it.

We had discussed, briefly, the download option when I was uploading and setting everything up.  The little “make available as a download?” checkbox is right on the page and not hard to find, so it did come up in conversation.  But just because an option is available isn’t a reason to check every box.  Our intent with Shivering Sands was to collect some of Warren’s best writing into a book – an actual, paper, something-you-can-hold-in-your-hand book.  We both saw the value of the editorial and layout work of the file I created to make that book, of course – we’d taken the time to sift through Warren’s rather hugenormous online body of work and collect the best bits into something solid and connected, and I’d taken some care to polish all those bits and make them readable and pretty on paper.  But we weren’t really… well I guess we just weren’t really thinking of making a download, you know?  Our intention was to Make A Book, and so we published A Book.

But intentions evolve, and the brilliant thing about publishing online is that as intentions evolve, it’s the matter of ticking a box to realize those changes.

So, as people asked for a digital version – for every reason from wanting an extra to take with them on their laptops or e-readers, to wanting a more financially accessible version to try out or save on postage, to wanting to print out particular sections (and since I took some care to give every essay it’s own left-facing title page, that’s a bonus), to just wanting to take a look at the layout (thank you!) with an eye to making their own books – we listened to those requests, and said all right then. 

For us, for Shivering Sands, enough people asked for a downloadable version that the answer to Digital Version: yes or no? became Sure, why not.

But for you, and even for future books for us, I can’t say with certainty whether that answer will be different.  Until (and if) POD companies like Lulu make it easy to upload a separate “for download” file so that self-publishers can choose to take advantage of, essentially, a different format, I’m just not terribly excited about the download options.  I can see the case-by-case pros for individuals, and I can see no real cons – but I can’t say “look at this exciting New and Different Thing!”  All I can say is “Here is another way for you to enjoy the original thing.” 

It’s very similar to putting the TOTW design on different styles of shirt, you know?  It’s the same design, we’re just giving you the choice of how you want to wear it.  The Shivering Sands download is the same book, we’re just giving you the choice of how you want to read it.

And choice is good, absolutely, and people are choosing the download, so I’m glad we’re offering it.  But my fellow Mechanics in the room will understand when I say I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I can publish a book and I can simultaneously (and easily) publish an e-book, AND I can say “Here’s two very different and exciting things, and you can get either or both, but the difference isn’t just going to be what you read them on.”

Might take a while, but we’ll get there.

And, in the meantime, my endorsement for Download On Demand versions of your Print On Demand book is a resounding: Might as well give it a go!

As opposed to the somewhat invisible design of things like book guts.  I’m talking about things like covers, t-shirts, wall prints, mugs, website headers — the stuff that’s meant to be seriously looked at.

And here’s the thing:  I’m not an artist.  I’ve got a couple of artistic bones in my body, sure — I’ve won a couple of games of Pictionary and I can usually decipher kids’ fridge drawings, so I’m not completely without artsy skillstuff.  I’m just not an artist.  Really, I don’t even know if I’m a designer.  The internet tells me that designers are people that sit around bitching about how clients are all idiots that insist on ever bigger logos, and I’m of the apparently unpopular opinion that logos should all be so damned sexy that everyone wants them bigger and on a t-shirt.  So, y’know, So I just don’t know if I (want) get to be in that fancy designer club, either.

But just last week Warren and I sold a week’s worth of apparel with nothing but a giant imaginary logo on, so, y’know, could be I know what I’m doing.

Of course, I really can’t tell you how to design a cover or a t-shirt or a logo.  Pretty much everything I do kinda starts out with a plan and quickly becomes “season to taste and then cook with some amount of fire until it’s done but not burned” or “hit it with a wrench until it stops making that noise and apologizes or it at least starts making some more pleasing noise” or “if nothing seems to be working that probably means it’s time to pop open another Red Bull.” None of which really works well for instructions or documentation.  Besides, I strongly doubt you want to make things that look like things I made, anyway.

What you want, probably, is to make something that you know looks good, and it’s going to be a really nice bonus if other people think it’s pretty, too.

And that I can sort of help with. 

A lot of my (design or otherwise) instincts stem from intent. By that I mean before I really start thinking about how I want something to look, I spend some time thinking about why I want it to look.  A cover has one job, honestly: It’s there to make you want to pick it up and look inside. The old “don’t judge a book by its cover” chestnut was really very likely started because people didn’t know that a cover has that job – they probably thought its sole purpose was to keep a little spill of Red Bull from seeping into the inside pages or something. 

When we make things look pretty on the outside, we increase the perceived value of the inside.  That goes for pretty much anything.  And yes, yes, there are as many definitions of “pretty” as there are stars in the sky, of course. But that’s something you should absolutely keep in mind whether you’re wrapping an album or a book or a magazine or even making a t-shirt, yes (because that’s a “cover” too): whatever your cover is going on, it needs to make the insides look better, before anyone even looks at them.

If you can’t do that – and don’t worry, if you’re on the internet someone will tell you so, and, really, you can ignore the first person that says “that looks a bit crap,” but you might want to listen to the third – if everything you make seems to get nothing but crit and no love… well, you know, that’s all right, actually. There’s a LOT to be said for staying plain and simple.  I love plain craft-paper wrapping, me.  If no one wants to touch your cover with a twenty foot pole, you might want to scale it back to just the title and the author on a solid color. Dialing it back down to basics never hurts.

The one thing I’m certain that 90% of first-time designers (and more than a handful of “seasoned” ones) never think to do is step back from their design and take a look from a distance.  And I mean that absolutely literally: set the thing to full screen, stand up and walk across the room, and actually look at the thing, from some real distance.

Hell, if you’ve got something you’re working on right now, go ahead and do that: pull it up in another window, stand up, and look at it from across the room.  Hell, leave the room – go make coffee or something – and then come back and look at it again.

What does your design look like, at a glance from a distance?  If it’s a book cover, can you even make out the title?  How about the author, or what’s going on with the colors and images?  Does it look like a book or does it look like a blob of colors and nonsense with nothing really going for it?  Because that’s what people are going to see on a shelf or in a thumbnail image. Whatever you see from across the room – if it doesn’t catch your eye or make a lick of sense, it’s not going to do any better for anyone else.

This is even *more* true of wearable or wall-hanging designs.  I mean, look, it may look great to you when you’re a foot away from the monitor (or design on the desk) – but those things aren’t meant to be held up right next to your face.  T-shirts need to look good from five feet away (fifty if you’re marketing to the restraining-order demographic), and wall art should really look as good when you’re on the couch as it does when you’re right up on it with a magnifying glass.  And if you want to sell it online, again, you’ve got the thumbnails thing working against your lovely design – there are a ton of people that just will not click through to “view larger” if they can’t make any sense of the teensy thumbnail image.

And if people aren’t even going to invest a click, they certainly aren’t going to give you a sale, right?

There will be, I’m certain, people screaming about the crassness of my commercialism and how design exists in a perfect and magical bubble of art that transcends the base desire to make money.  And I’m… not really talking to those people because, as I said at the beginning, I’m not part of their fancy club.  I’m chock full o’ base desires, not least of which are my desires to pay rent and Make Stuff that people want, and the best days are the ones where I can kill two birds with one well-designed stone.

Now, if you didn’t click that inline link up there in the middle, I’m going to send you there again, here at the end. You really should go here and read Warren talking about Designing To Be Wanted, two years ago.  Because, yes, he says “magazine” a lot, but that’s just what he was on about at the time.  What he really means is “Stuff.”

it is the role of the artist to challenge society. no one who lives within the system and makes conventional choices is capable of expanding the box we find ourselves in. that?s why it?s called, ?thinking outside? of it, and to do so, you have to be aware of it first. I believe ?artists? are people born with the dubious skill of acute box-awareness. I say dubious because, if they are anything like me (and I suspect they are, or I am like them), once aware of the confines placed on our existence it becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate them.

there are a lot of assumptions made about what constitutes a successful life. there is, I think, a certain amount of gender-based difference as to the specific expectations on an individual, but the checklist as I understand it runs: stable job, house, car, children, and subsequently future generations. all as expensive as possible. these things equal security, and if yours is like mine, your family says they ?just want you to be happy,? but what they mean is, ?I just want you to be safe, secure, and never take risks with your future.?

the laughable thing, the thing that keeps me from settling happily into the box, surrounded by wood-chips and a little exercise wheel that keeps me running constantly, going nowhere, is an underlying inability to believe that the checklist is actually working out for anybody.

As of right now, my little brother is 21 years old.* I wish oodles of happy natal felicitations to the lad — who can be found right here online. May he have many, many more gleeful, productive years ahead! And even though the occasion veritably cries out for me to tell embarrassing stories about him as a wee nublet of a boy, I will do no such thing.

At this time.

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* He’s … um … rather significantly younger than me, yes.

My day was actually similar to:

G’night.

(I have no credits for the shot. Please add them in comments if you know.)

So who can tell me what the Deathfall is? Has anyone in the class ever heard of that before? ... Yes, um, Bladeflake? Yes? ... Well, sure, that's one way to put it. It *is* a sort of "crazy blizzard", I suppose.

You see, when you are all grown up and you have done all the grown-up things you were meant to do in your life, and you begin to hear the icy groan in your limbs - the creak and crack that happens as your crystalline bones weaken with age - then you will gather your strength one last time, along with all the other Ice Lords of your age, to make the trek over the mountains, across the plain, all the way around the world to invade and besiege the fiery tropical realm of the Fire Princesses.

Yes, of course it's very hot there! Blistering! The Princesses live in eternal daylight, the sun forever above them, their homes built right into the thousands of sputtering, shaking volcanoes that smolder in the bright, scorching light. And the Princesses themselves run red-hot with the boiling fluid that runs through their veins.

Yes, Stormhammer. It does sound like a dangerous place and yes, in fact, it can kill you. It *will* kill you. It *does* kill you. The Deathfall is the last thing you do in your life: You invade their land and you slake your desire on any and every Princess you can. Their flesh will burn your eyes and splinter your skin but your icy seed can survive - and it will. You will leave it in as many of their boiling wombs as you can before your body can take no more, and you melt.

That's right. You will melt. All that is you will eventually fail to hold and you will break into pieces and vanish as steam off the body of your final conquest. That is how we Ice Lords die. And that is how we make new life.

Yes, babies. This is where babies come from. The seed's stony case will melt and fertilize and the Princesses will bear new children. Those who are girls will be, of course, Fire Princesses, to be raised under the bright and scorching sun. Those who are boys will be Ice Lords, to be raised here in the comforting embrace of night.

How? Well, of course the newborns cannot travel all the way back around the world on their own, and they cannot survive long among the volcanoes. So they must be brought to us. Each year, at the Birthspring, the oldest among the Princesses - the ones who have done all the grown-up things they were meant to do in their lives, who no longer feel the heat of their own blood, whose skins have begun to crack from the smoke - gather their strength one last time to trek across the plain and over the mountains, all the way around the world before the last of their life-spark expires... to bring us our sons.

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For consideration: ...it's like MARCH OF THE PENGUINS meets a Ralph Bakshi cartoon...

a visit to Doctor Beef?s Storm Troopin? set on flickr is always a worthwhile activity.

For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.

My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.

Inflection Points

View more presentations from Jamais Cascio.

By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.

The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.

• Keynote: Bruce Sterling (us) on Atemporality | transmediale
  "If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The second conference session is being introduced with Bruce Sterling's Keynote on Atemporality."
  (tags:video )

Jack Bauer saves the day... with AOL 3.0

unhappyhipsters brings me a special kind of joy.

unhappyhipsters:

At the art opening, he?d been convinced the blank canvas symbolized endless possibilities. Back at home, it was just one more reminder of his own desperation.

(Photo: Raimund Koch; Dwell, April 2009)

true story.

bigworldsmallvictories:

Sentimentality follows preservation.

A

Good morning! Fancy A Fierce Pancake for breakfast?

HOW MUCH IS THE FISH? HOW MUCH IS THE CHIPS?! (Lara! Thank you!)

Egads, how could I have forgotten about these freakwads? I once loved their one-and-only studio album, A Fierce Pancake with the same passion reserved for exceptional goofballs like Primus, Billy Nayer Show, Mr Bungle, Idiot Flesh, Violent Femmes, Fishbone, and Adam the the Ants. But it’s been a long, long time since I last listened…

Is it just me, or does Mick Lynch look uncannily like Siege (yanno, if Siege were crossed with Ed Grimley and a lemur)?

Formed in London in 1983, Stump were a legendary Anglo-Irish indie/experimental/rock group inspired by Captain Beefheart. The lineup was Kev Hopper on bass, Rob McKahey on drums, Chris Salmon on guitar, and Mick Lynch on vocals. They toured a lot in the mid 80s on a couple of brilliant, bizarre EPs, and their energetic live shows quickly earned them a cult following. Then they got signed to a major label, apparently squabbled constantly during the production of AFP and broke up soon afterward, a quarter of a million pounds in debt to their record company, and never to be heard from again.*

The entire album is cracked fucking genius. It’s also very difficult to track down anymore. Beg, borrow, steal a copy if you can.

Read the rest of Better Than Coffee: A Fierce Pancake

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Post tags: Better than coffee, Crackpot Visionary, Dance, Geekdom, Music, Punk, Silly-looking types