Planning your workflow

However you plan to work in the production of your book, spend some time now planning your workflow, using the notes above as a guide.

Think about how much flexibility you can allow yourself – don’t put yourself under too much pressure. At the same time, be aware of time constraints that may be outside your control. If you’re using a local printer, for example, make contact as soon as possible. Your printer may have a limited timeframe for doing your job and you’ll need to factor this into your workflow.

Workflow

Day 1 – Scoping, determining output

Scoping is done after already having determined what the project will be, and should therefore not take more than a few hours, considering the length of the book, which should be relatively short. Regardless of the subject that I will choose, I have already decided on the output, and done research beforehand on the services available, and the guidelines to follow.

Day 1/2 – Research and development

Depending on the subject, research will likely take 10-15 hours, and sourcing images is likely to take anywhere between 5-15 hours. I know from the “sequencing images” exercise that sourcing images can be deceptively difficult, so I should ideally decide on a subject while taking this aspect into consideration.

Day 2/5 – Creating texts and images

Once again, the amount of time required for this varies greatly depending on subject, but the texts would already begin to take shape while doing the research. As for creating the images, this depends on how many images I would have to create, whether I would be doing illustrations from zero, or editing photos, and the latter would then vary according to the photos that I manage to source. For example, if I needed to edit 20 pictures, it could take me anywhere between 5-20 hours depending on the complexity of the composites, and the same timeframe could be applied to vector illustrations. If photographs sourced are close to being ready to use, then light editing and resizing could take just 10 minutes per photo. I will certainly be relying in the mediums and applications that I feel confident in, as it would be absurd to have to split my focus between producing the book and learning new techniques far outside my comfort zone.

Day 5/8 – Sample page, page layout, proofing

I would likely have begun working on sample pages right after deciding on the subject for the book, as it would factor into the research and development portion of the production process. Having a good and reliable selection of typefaces to choose from is a big help as it prevents me from getting lost on Adobe fonts or other sources.

An initial flatpan would have been created after the research phase, in order to determine if the amount of content gathered thus far was sufficient. Furthermore, relying on modular grids helps me to create layouts quite efficiently, so I think that I would be able to move through this quite quickly.

As long as I am paying attention to detail, which is usually the case, proofing will not take too much time, but I do tend to triple-check everything.

Day 8 – Print preparation

Since I already knew the printer’s requirements, and everything in my file should therefore already meet the specifications, it would just be a matter of exporting the file in the required format, which I would then check again just in case I had somehow missed any errors.

Conclusion

This does seem to be quite a short timeframe to produce a book, but the total hours will likely add up to around 100, which I believe should be sufficient to produce a good book, even though it might not be very long. My biggest worry is actually being able to decide on a subject for the book, and that could derail my plans if I am not able to shift my focus onto the production thereof.