The ad you designed is in another publication

It was a problem well before the digital age: a publication takes time to create an advertisement for a special client, and then that ad starts appearing in the opposition papers.

With the newspaper Worsley Press used to own we would include a box on most proofs stating that the design of ads where we did the layout was our copyright and could not be used elsewhere without permission. I think it included a statement that a reproduction fee would be charged, though I don't think we actually ever tried that. We also wrote to the publishers involved reminding them of copyright law.

Other suggestions: include the name of your publication in the 4pt code on the ad that identifies the file, and maybe include a copyright symbol. No publication likes including another's name even in tiny type.

But nothing will work if you cannot persuade the client that they should not submit ads created by you to other publications unless they are prepared to pay you a design fee. Most businesses which do not employ advertising agents or design bureaus directly simply do not understand that there can be any restrictions on something which is based on their words.

Finally, get your sales people to start pointing out to potential advertisers that your designs are so good, that others can only copy.

I won't suggest that if copying becomes too blatant, that you do what we did once -- include a deliberate error in the proof then correct it immediately so there's no danger of it creeping through. Then wait for the mistake to appear in the opposition. Phone numbers are good for that ;-)

Get fed two ways

When I mentioned in our Format email newsletter that there was now The Worsley Blog, I had an almost immediate comment that it was a pity it was not available as an RSS feed. That was 24 hours ago, but in that time I have found out a lot more about blogging -- which included that many people keep up to date on blogs via newsfeed readers, and that there are two ways of outputting blogs to them. It may be a little like the video tape wars of a few decades ago -- but there are two systems, RSS and Atom. Most people use readers which need RSS but we offered Atom. So, now we offer both. The Atom feed is at blog.worsleypress.com/atom.xml and the RSS feed is at feeds.feedburner.com/TheWorsleyBlog

Buy this - it won't last!

The above scan from a local newspaper (not the one I featured earlier) features the advertising line which turns me off immediately: "It won't last".

Especially with a product as expensive as a vehicle, why would I want to buy something which won't last"

How to start a publication?

This week I was asked:

I work for a church of 3600 members. Currently, we don't have any type of monthly or quarterly publication for our church. I was wondering if you could help orient me in getting started. What baby steps would you recommend for a church of 3,500 Sunday attenders to go from no monthly publication to something nice??? Can you refer me to someone who I can pay to do it for me?

My reply was that I would be surprised if, among any group of 3600 people, there are not people who have some experience of producing a newsletter or magazine -- perhaps for a school, business or service group. They may be a starting point. Another is to look at what is being produced by other organizations -- and it is common for copies of locally produced publications to be sent to local libraries, so the librarian may also be a good contact. And while you may decide that your needs can be served by a home-produced publication, perhaps photocopied, a call at local printing businesses may also produce samples of publications, and an indication of other services, such as someone who can set up templates in a word processor or page layout program and help train in their use. This kind of enquiry may also help to give some idea of costs, depending on what services have to be paid for and what can be done on a voluntary basis. You also have to make choices on whether a publication can be at least partly financed by advertisements, and how you will obtain editorial: can it be all produced by you and your members, or will you need to seek outside contributions. Several of the chapters in our book "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" look at various ways of organizing a magazine and at the many levels of production from photocopying or laser printing to digital printing and to the uses of commercial and specialist printers.

Where's the proofreader?

I feel the pain. I've had misspellings even bigger than this, but in this case a note from the production person that he or she wants a heading (and a byline from whoever wrote it) got past everyone else in the process.

This was from my local newspaper this week. And I suspect it may show that the larger you make the type, the fewer people may actually read it. I spotted the missing byline before I noticed the missing head.

Fonts and spaces

A recent question in a newsgroup had its own answer:

Why do people prefer indented single-spaced paragraphs with two spaces after the period and a 12pt Times New Roman font? I suspect it's because Newspapers have been printing text that way almost since Guttenburg... and people hate to change.

Indented paras with no space between, yes, but two spaces after a period? Only in very amateurish newspapers which do not realize that in most fonts the extra space is built in with the actual dot at the left hand end of the glyph. Spacing between paragraphs is quite common in newspapers when text is set ragged right, either as a style or for special features. And paragraph spacing is a common ploy to make stories fit. And Times? Great font for papers printed on very high quality newsprint. Most newspapers have used more suitable fonts even from before Times New Roman was designed. Morison created that in 1932 for a specific use and it got out of hand when it was built in to most of the early laserprinters. "The Times" has not used it for decades. I made the point in an article usually titled Face it - your body matters" which has been published in a number of publications for newspaper and periodical publishers. Here's an extract:

I asked a number of typographers for their recommendations for a newspaper font, to be printed on standard newsprint. Six came up with nine recommendations. I'll list them all in no particular order: Nimrod, Olympian, Rotation, Times Europa, Calisto, Melior, Stone, Lucida and Lino Letter. While some are categorised as serif fonts, others are classified by the foundries as "slab serif". All have most aspects in common - wideset, with good variation between thick and thin strokes, but with no fine strokes, large bowls to letters such as e and a and relatively large x-height. X-height is the height of lowercase characters such as x which have no descenders or ascenders.

The same principles apply if you are using a low cost book paper, especially those which are intended to bulk-up a book. Different font choices would apply if you are producing text on coated stock. People in general don't know they are seeing bad or good typographic choices -- they just stop reading if the task is made unnecessarily difficult. Those choices are partially conditioned by experience and by fashion but also by more direct influences such as the ease with which the eye can take in the information.

Subtle change to DTP history

One of the reputable print industry magazines, Print 21, has just come out with a subtle retelling of the InDesign v QuarkXPress story. You can read it at www.print21online.com Among minor points is the suggestion that PageMaker is up to version 8 and tells the story thus:

"Originally designed for the Mac it was the first PostScript-based desktop layout program and after its initial success it was snapped up by Adobe in 1994. Arguably the acquisition of PageMaker distracted Adobe from the main game for many years as it tried to re-engineer the software to compete in the professional publishing market. Due to some fundamental design attributes it was never going to work and while PageMaker is still in existence, now in version 8, it is confined to the office and home market where it competes with a plethora of low-end simple-to-use layout programs. Its failure left Adobe withouta credible professional layout program for many crucial years."

For my take on this era of history see What We Might Have Done... And for a very person view on the development of DTP see this PC Update article DTP I Gave You All The Best Years Of My Life

Converting to grayscale

Jim, one of the readers of our book Publication Production using PageMaker asked:

I'm looking for a simple (read: cheap) photo editor that can set digital color photos to grayscale. Some have that tool, some don't; I'm considering Microsoft Picture It! but I can't discover if that has a grayscale tool.

I replied: You seem to have hit the problem with a lot of graphics editing programs: conversion to grayscale isn't near the top of their list of wanted features so it is hard to check whether they do it or not. However, I'm sure I've seen a reference to the Picture It! series of programs accepting scanned images in grayscale so I would be surprised if it did not allow conversion to that. For several small newspapers I've suggested Photoshop Elements because, while that doesn't handle CMYK, it definitely does handle grayscale. It has the other advantages that anyone who knows Photoshop will be at home with it, and anyone who gets started with that can quickly switch to Photoshop. It also has the batch facilities of Photoshop, so it is easy to set it up to automatically change a folder full of pics to grayscale. There is a demo version on the Adobe web site but it is a fairly large program. I'd also look at PaintShop Pro and I've heard some good comments on EyeBatch but I'm not sure how that handles grayscale. At least you can try it for nothing. Can anyone confirm about Picture It!, or have any other suggestions?

Who will be at the InDesign conference?

September 15 is the deadline for reduced rates to attend the InDesign conference in Melbourne, at A$695. I had one comment on my piece in our Format newsletter that it seemed a lot for a two-day conference, but, as well as the local experts it provides a rare opportunity to see and hear people such as David Blatner and Sandee Cohen. See http://www.TheInDesignConference.com/australia/indexa.html