Graphic Design Accomplishments

Silly me, yesterday I said that I haven't done anything Otter Necessities-ish lately, even though I include graphic design stuff under the big heading of Otter-ish.

Last week I finished the Program Book Death March, and finished the book Thursday night. Almost a week early, yay me!  OTOH, the person I've worked with for the last few years at the printer (CL Graphics, in Crystal Lake, IL - shameless plug) retired at the end of June, so I'm working with new (to-me) people, and we're also changing binding method, so I wanted plenty of lead time in case there were issues.

Ron's uploaded the book to the MuseCon web page, at the moment its the first link in the top of the page "A Few More Updates" box: www.musecon.org

The second link is for pre-ordering shirts, the deadline for that is Sunday night. (This message brought to you by Shameless Plugs-R-Us).
 
Last year we had 52 interior pages, which was more than optimal for saddle stitch (fold & staple) binding, but they made it work. This year I was pretty sure we were going to go over that on page count, so I also loosened up the layout a little, mostly in terms of line spacing. And then we added a whole 'nother room of programming, the blinkie guys added a couple/few new blinkies, and with one thing and another we're up to 64 interior pages. 

So, the plan is for a spiral binding - a metal or plastic coil that looks like a stretched spring. Although the printer called yesterday, to ask if they could test-run a copy on a (new?) machine they were going to fire up last night, which might be able to saddle stitch the book. They also suggested slightly lighter paper as an option for saddle-stitching. I said they could go ahead and run a test copy, but budget-wise we're expecting to pay for a more expensive binding.  

Saturday we started signage. We're "Nurturing Our Muses" this year, so I've been going with a gardening-ish theme, which none of the artwork I've been using for signage really fits. So, I went through my Dover book of flower, fruit, and vegetable seed packet images. and found a bunch that I liked and weren't going to be too hard to take the words off of. IIRC Ron had that done by lunchtime. 

So far I've gotten signs made for Registration, Hospitality Suite, a list of optional supplies for the book-making class, and gotten all three days worth of signs made for the Lakeshore Ballroom.  I do one 11"x17" sign per day for the programming rooms, and then just one sign each for Hospitality Suite and Reg.

In past years I've picked fonts that are similar to what was used on the original artwork, but the seed packets all use either a pretty basic serif or sans-serif font, so I've picked one similar display-size sans font and am using that on all of them. So instead I've been changing the color of the text to coordinate with the background images. Because I'm crazy that way...

And tonight I'm going to put together a book of old family photos for a relative's major-milestone birthday. The original plan was a scrapbook page (yes, that is the sound of me rolling my eyes), but on a quick pass through the not-really-old photos, I found 3 dozen strong candidates. Plus there's a couple more of the really old pictures of people I don't know who they were, but they have the Ohman family face that I want to include, as well as some fairly recent ones. So I'll still do a page for the scrapbook, but also a book of photos. Which I need to have done and in Michigan by Saturday. Procrastination FTW. I'm pretty sure the relation in question doesn't read this, so I'm safe nattering about it.

So, I have been busy with more than just knitting and fussing about Ron and Elrond.