Our Ode to Maria

Our Maria – how she has grown.

It is with very sad faces that we share the news of Maria leaving us this week. She is off on her big OE.

We know it's something that everyone needs to do, but the loss of her smile and skill to our studio will be hard to replace. Maria is the last member of our Christchurch design team and without her wonderful support it is hard to imagine how we would have survived the big move and transition to Auckland.

Maria applied for a Mac Op position in the same year that she finished studying at Nat Col. Her CV stood out from the crowd like a shining light, one that I will never forget. She had taken the time to look at our website and find a connection to our team with a photograph accompanying her application that said 'Hire Me'. How could you not give the girl an interview.

Her organizational skills stood out very early on as she tackled a 140 book educational versioning project and then a huge 800+ page soup book. These were just a warm-up for the next 3 years. Maria has tackled a branding and curriculum upgrade over 3 levels that would make many people's hair turn grey at the thought. In scrolling through the emails just now I saw lots of comments like 'excellent Maria, thanks once again', 'we really appreciate you keeping us informed' and 'great work'.

Our problem though was that she was very quickly out growing her Mac Op role and needed to get her teeth into some real design.

As studio manager, I was really reluctant to lose or distract Maria from the great role that she was doing. Her colleagues urged me to rethink and give her more of a challenge, to let her grow, they'd help, they said. Wow, thank goodness I listened.

Maria's growth is one that I have found extraordinary to watch. I feel so privileged to have her as part of our team (I can't use the word 'had', as I really don't want her departure to arrive). During the earthquakes, Maria was living on the west side of Christchurch, so she had power/water and was the only one who was able to keep the company operating. While most of our clients were understanding and happy to wait - there is always one who would like to 'but'. Maria just did it. We got the files off our server (actually, I think we just gave her the whole server) and she put it all together, while we were all putting our lives back together.

In August 2011 Maria packed up her car and joined her good friend and fellow designer Sarah for the big shift to Auckland. It was her first time away from home and her first time in Auckland. She loved it! For our company, she was our rock. With so many changes and shifting sands, it was Maria who was there to hold it all together. Her knowledge and common sense is so valued and will be missed for a while to come.

I've tried to put together this design story to show Maria's progress over the years. I hope you can see her growth as much as I can. Do look right to the bottom to see what she is working on this week as a fitting end to the pinnacle of her career with Book Design. To any new employer, firstly, please, we want her back. Secondly, you are lucky enough to gain one of the best people I have ever been lucky enough to employ. Our very best wishes Maria, we so look forward to watching your future journey.

 

Please feel free to add a comment and leave Maria a message.

Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community: Ann Patchett: 'Authors Need to Get Involved'

Beattie's Book Blog - unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community: Ann Patchett: 'Authors Need to Get Involved': Shelf Awareness "If you had asked me two years ago, I would not have thought it was my responsibility. But I do think authors need ...

Exciting ebooks with Anne Luo

Life has been interesting and sometimes challenging in the studio recently as we push forward with the ever-changing ebook/digital format options for producing books.

More and more the printed page is no longer the final word, we are now being asked to produce books that have an additional life as an eBook, interactive PDF, fixed layout or flowable ePub, to name a few!

Thanks to some real advances with the latest versions of Creative Suite, and streamlining of how we set up our InDesign files we are now (if you listen to Adobe’s marketing) only one click away from producing an ePub file and a beautiful ebook…yeah. This is where we have conquered the most challenges. Our 'Book Design' aim has been to keep the same level of design that goes into a print book coming through to the ebook, e.g. chapter headings, type design, page breaks, text spacing, wrapping, tables etc (we don't want our ebooks looking like digitised manuscripts) and then get the file through the validation process. There are speed bumps here that need fixing. 

Other valuable assets that an ebook has or can have are navigational and local table of contents, searchable content, use of live hyperlinks, inclusion of sound and video, etc. These also all need to work and validate to enhance the readers’ experience. Which is totally what our aim is.

I learnt the secrets of cracking open the epub and editing the codes in toc.ncx and content.opf files (two of most important files in an epub that control just about EVERYTHING). They looked like headaches at the start but got easier and more familiar the more I did. By the time I’d edited, zipped and unzipped, previewed and ran validation tests many, many (and many more) times the validation result was 'Congratulations! No problems were found'. HOORAY!!!

That was the biggest challenge completed, getting the validation problem-free. From here I could move to uploading an ebook to an online reseller. For this we developed an interactive Metadata form with all the questions needed to make the uploading process smooth and easy. 

There are a variety of ebook formats out there and each suits a different type of book. Fixed-layout ebooks are a relatively new kind of ePub. Someone said it is like a hybrid of a PDF with complete control of the pages and a flowable ePub which is an open-source format of digital books. Unlike normal flowable ePubs in which the content flows on in page dimensions and fonts determined by end user devices, we have complete control over the design and page layout in fixed-layout ebooks. The text is alive and searchable in fixed-layout just as in a flowable ePub. We can achieve text sitting on top of images without rasterizing the whole page to a flattened image, like you’d have to do for flowable ePubs. This format is great for children's pictures books, and any books with content-specific layout where text and images need to stay at certain positions.

To achieve these advantages it requires a lot more work cracking the codes in HTML base programs like Dreamweaver, but in many cases it's definitely worth the effort, and the possibilities for this format are very exciting.

We also had a recent project requiring a new level of communication with client returnable interactive PDF forms. These are more advanced than the interactive PDFs we have made in the past, with form fields, clickable internal links and external hyperlinks. Adobe Reader 8 and later users can fill in and save PDF files locally, and send these back to the author electronically. This makes data communication much faster, easier and fun too. You just type an answer directly on the file page and hit the send button. 

This great ability with PDF forms can bring many other projects to the next level. For example, educational books now can have fillable write-on-line and comments fields in an electronic PDF version. Teachers and students who use free Adobe Reader can fill out their answers and comments and send to each other by email. Simple.

So we keep learning, keep learning and keep learning. The more we do, the easier it gets.

Perhaps one day it will be just one click of a button to produce any of the above. But not yet, and that is where we are here to help.