Learning while doing

I just finished formatting a very complex ebook. It included many photos, illustrations, captions, bulleted and numbered lists with bolded lead ins, drop caps, a table of contents, an index, and more.

This was also a print book, and of course that I designed in InDesign. I’ll have to put something in the portfolio to contrast the two at some point, but while the conversion isn’t absolutely perfect, it’s pretty darned good and I’m pleased with it. Working the conversion from InDesign to print is quite different than Word to print. It meant me having to work through an entire lecture series on lynda.com (THE go-to place to find tutorials), in this case, “InDesign CS6 to EPUB Kindle and iPad”. Well worth the time and effort though, of course, I could not bill the client for learning time.

I now feel very confident of my epub interior design skills!

The Cobbler and all that

It’s a mess in here right now, and I apologize profusely to those of you encountering my website for the first time. As a professional graphic designer it is always wise to have everything in perfect condition on your website at every moment. However, we are a lot like the cobbler who has no shoes; getting time to do my own work on my own site is sometimes almost impossible. Right now I have several major projects going on and am trying to get an entirely new dog sport (Barn Hunt) off the ground. So it’s even crazier than usual.

So why now?

Several reasons. I’ve had my current site for a couple of years. It is done in CSS and shows some CSS skills but it’s also somewhat outdated CSS code. I think my CSS can be better demonstrated in other ways. Also, these days many sites are going toward WordPress. Most of my clients like the idea of being able to update their site themselves. So using WordPress for my own site is also a good demonstration project. Using a WordPress site which has extensive filterable portfolio choices is an even better idea, as my portfolio had gotten clumsy and needed a lot of work. Once I get the site up and going, it will be easier to update my work.

So that’s the short end of a longer story I could bore you to death with, but I won’t. Meanwhile, thank you so much for your patience.