Today is the first day of the school year at Seattle Central Creative Academy. I wanted to take this moment to give a “shout-out” (type-out?) to my classmates that approached me saying how they kept up with my blog over the summer. Awkward, but wonderful moments in a blogger’s life. (Awk-wonderful?)

Note to self: Review– Fonts. Font Combinations. (Check this link out.)

Jill’s website/syllabus for this class. It is the first day of the first class, Long Documents. This quarter we’ll be designing a book and magazine. Jill explained the evolving world of “books,” if you can even call them that anymore. The difference between e-books and epub is the difference that an electronic book simply refers to the digital reincarnation of the book whereas epub is a format. It is a zipped set of elements that contain among other things, html. Jill said that she considered it as a mini-website. Due to the nature of the industry and time constraints, we will not be making physical books as in past years in the program.

One column/manuscript grid

I wish we had a few minutes before diving into today’s tutorial to reacquaint with the new InDesign (CS6!). I wanted to set up my preferences as per Jason Hoppe’s advice from the InDesign class last school year.

Here’s a visual of the process to starting designing a book in InDesign. Setting up the document size of 8” x 5.375”. If books were the human race, Eve is the Manuscript Grid. Book designers of old utilized the golden-ratio to create their manuscript page with heavenly gutters. (The height of the text box matches the width of the page. How cool!) As a rule, book design stems from this proportions. This is a guide to make a guide. From this guide, you can deviate from it slightly to get a more modern variant. This is a good way to get started on book design. Sometimes, it’s intimidating to create because you start with a blank page. After using this process, creating some masterpages with page numbers (folios), running headers, and margins, it’s no longer a blank page but an excellent start to a beautiful book.