Thursday, 30 July 2009

SoFoBoMo 2010: learning materials

If you're interested, or participated, in Solo Photo Book Month, then you've probably seen Paul Butzi's announcement about next year's event. And you've maybe seen Colin Jago's call for help with translations.

Another feature for the website that we are planning is learning material to help SoFoBoMoers with various aspects of planning, preparing and completing their photobook. The aim is to have two main parts to this: first a community supported Wiki with lots of useful info on relevant topics, presented in a way useful for the event and second downloadable instructions for various tasks, especially around using appropriate software for making the book. I'll be leading the charge on this front.

Topics that will definitely get covered:

image formats, pdf in general, pdf creation, colour management, book making software (Scribus, Pages, InDesign), layout principles.

But this post is also a call for help on two fronts:
If there are other topics you want covered, drop a comment here which gets published and I'll gather them all up and try and include them in the plan. Was there stuff you wish you'd known in advance? Stuff you still don't know but wish you did?

On the other hand I'm looking for volunteers to help put together material for the site. Got useful tips? Instructions on particular software? Want to help testing the instructions? Found some useful resources that got you through SoFoBoMo? Drop a comment (won't get published) with contact details and I'll get in touch with how you can help. No submissions just yet, just volunteers.

In due course there will be a community editable wiki etc on the website but for now we need to gather initial material to populate it once it's running. And we'll be encouraging translation of that stuff, too.

Posted by doonster at 11:00

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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous30 July 2009 at 13:55

    Martin,

    I'd be happy to contribute to the wiki on using Scribus and/or LaTeX for SoFoBoMo (I've used both).

    Although I'm sure LaTeX is only for a hardy few, those that are capable should really know about that option as it makes cranking out the book for different sizes really simple.

    Thanks for taking this on.

    --Eric

    ReplyDelete
  2. Markus Spring30 July 2009 at 22:15

    Eric, LaTeX is definitely interesting. With all those GUIs I learn to cherish a clear interface without those tick boxes I can't remember in which state I left them for a certain result... and no version control system that could bring me back there.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Walter McQuie4 August 2009 at 00:43

    Martin:

    Since my first comment I've looked through your posts and benefitted from your evidence based comments about jpg compression... Very helpful.

    Thanks for your efforts.

    Walter

    ReplyDelete
  4. doonster4 August 2009 at 01:54

    Walter, wait until you see my next post on jpeg (in a day or so) - possibly even more surprising.

    ReplyDelete

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