OK, here we go, my latest attempt at networking is adding "Follow This Blog" to my gadgets.
I have so much to do to catch up with everyone else. What seems to come natural for so many is a big learning curve for me. I have spent the last 11 years working in a pre-press house as a production artist, embedded first in Quark and then InDesign. I have been buried in specs, page layouts, typography and master graphics. This has been all wrapped around the aspects of building school book pages for major publishing firms.
While it has been a good learning experience, it lacks a lot in developing my creativity. It has taught me a lot about the aspects of good page layout, proper development of style sheets, the importance of consistency etc.
The publishing industry has greatly changed in the last few years. The biggest change is that most of the work is being outsourced to areas like Asia, the Philippines, and India. Where once you were a production artist, in today's industry you have become a project manager. I much preferred being in the trenches and doing the actual work.
To continue with the subject at hand, I have been very lax in networking and focusing on the whole world of design on the web. For the last several years, I have been playing with, attempting, working toward, developing my own company called DreamSpeaker Graphics.
Now it is time for catch-up. And I have a lot to do. So, I have started this blog, I am getting involved in twittering, I am following several blogs and sites, I have portfolios on Jamuse and Graphics.com. I still have a lot of work to do. I don't understand yet the whole aspect of digging, dilicious and so much more. So much to learn, and so much to do. Its boggling how so many people do so much. Calvin Lee at Mayhem Studios, David Blatner of InDesign Secrets (among other things), and Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design seem to have made the day 48 hours long with all that they do.
Gonna enter this in the Designer Writing Project. One more way to network and hopefully get some helpful advice, thoughts, ideas.
So, if anyone out there is reading this, thoughts, suggestions, and ideas are most welcome.
Posts
2 comments:
Pete, tho' I design and lay out books, I think my blog, at http://www.tianodesign.com, might be of interest to you nonetheless. Take a gander. I discuss a bit about book design (the mechanics, the process) networking, and freelancing.
Thanks for your note on my blog. Appreciated it. Didn't know if anyone was really even looking at it.
Read several of your articles and they are good.
Like you I think, I have done several math books using powermath, York Math, InMath and some old program I can't remember where it actually made all the math actual eps. Arghhhh.
I am really pretty much over doing school books and their expectations and the whole outsourcing issues that are going on today are, in my opinion, destroying the quality of these books.
I wouldn't mind doing magazines, tabletop books, or private books—for example childrens illustated books or novels etc.
Again thank you for checking out my blog and making comments.
Comments and ideas are always appreciated.
Post a Comment