Today’s Plan
:
- Book Cover and Jacket
- Book Production Presentation
- Book Production Project Rubric
- Garr Reynolds and Presentation Zen Design
- Canvas assignment: Make a Zen Presentation
- Hand back posters
- Work Time
- Homework
Book Cover and Jacket
Today I wanted to revisit the book cover portion of the project. You will notice that I am asking for a book cover with a jacket, the flaps that keep a cover on a hard cover book. There’s a number of tutorials for how to do these, but I found this one to be the most useful: Design Like a Pro’s youtube tutorial on book jackets. Design Like a Pro has another tutorial that shows how they design a 9×6 book cover from scratch.
Note that she use a whole inch for the spine. This likely would be too thick for books of poetry, which tend to be smaller. My guess is 1/2 to a 3/4 inch would be sufficient for the spine (and I would have a design that could accommodate different widths.
So, just remember that your book cover needs to have:
- Front cover
- Back cover
- Spine
- Front flap
- Back flap
Get your hands on some hardcovers with jackets to get a sense of what appears inside.
Book Production Presentation
The final component of our second project is to develop a presentation that “pitches” your book design. The hypothetical scenario here is that you are making a submission for a publishing firm to redesign an existing cover and book. Your presentation should not only focus on what you have designed, but should situate that design within both past book covers *and* popular contemporary covers and design trends.
The article linked above indicates that good pitches concisely tell a story, addressing three “why’s”:
- Why here?
- Why now?
- Why you?
These questions are aimed at authors pitching their written work to specific outlets, but we can adapt them to fit our hypothetical situation:
- What is out there?
- What did you do?
- What should we see?
- What makes this work special?
Your presentation should use language and terms from our reading and class discussions. Your presentation should be about technical process (what you did, how you did it) and design rationale (why you did it).
The central focus of the presentation should be on showing us your book. Obviously, you should use images.
Also, you PowerPoint should itself be visually appealing and reflect the design considerations we have discussed this semester, including layout, typography, contrast, and color. Last night’s reading in Presentation Zen should have given some nuts and bolts advice on developing visually beautiful PowerPoints.
I expect each presentation will be five minutes long. You should time and practice your presentation before class. It is quite likely that your career path as a professional writer will involve some measure of public speaking before audiences, so take this as an opportunity to practice.
Book Production Project Rubric
Here it is:
- Book Cover:
- Layout in accordance with White Space, rule of thirds, and/or golden section
- Color and Contrast help determine focal point, which should *probably* be on the title
- Typographically appropriate
- Proper spacing and typography on the back cover and jacket flaps
- Proper sizing
- Front Matter:
- Has title page, table of contents, copyright page w/ proper numbering (including section reset)
- Typographic design reflects published work
- Poems:
- Typography for titles and body
- Running header and page numbers
- Line numbers (for longer poems)
- Textual commentary (footnotes, etc) handled properly (note every collection has this)
- Some kind of experimental layout or typography or use of images
- Presentation:
- Visual design reflects Presentation Zen, including typography and layout
- Presentation shows adequate market/genre research
- Presentation is articulate and insightful
- Presentation is longer than 4 minutes but shorter than 6 minutes
Presentation Zen
Today I’m working from Garr Reynold’s summation of his design principles in the form of a plain .pdf. I want to spend some time talking about these principles, examining them in action, and then asking you to put them into practice.
First, let’s look at a brief description of Reynold’s about putting these design principles into action.
Next, let’s look at a collection of before and after slides. As we work, I want you to write down a list of what you see happening in the before and after.
Finally, I want you to create a short PowerPoint (say 6 slides) that puts Reynolds’ theory into practice. Please turn any section of his .pdf linked above into a PowerPoint.
In making this presentation, you should use copyright-free (or copyleft) images. These are images that are in the public domain. There is a number of resources to help find images in public domain:
- Creative Commons Image Search
- Library of Congress Image Database. Note–not everything here is copyright free.
- Public Domain Images
- Free stock photos. There are many sites that offer free stock photography, that link contains some of the better sites. Note that stock photography can go wrong.
Upload these presentations to Canvas.
Handing Back Posters
While you are working on your presentations, I want to hand back posters and check to see if any grades are missing. After that, you have the rest of class time to work on your projects.
Homework
Complete Project Two.
