Intermittens Presents: XX and other works

[Cramulus]

Great to see it done! This is a great collection of writing, I'll be glad to have it on my coffee table / bathroom / leave copies in places.

Could I offer some style feedback?

[Placid Dingo]

Thanks Tel.

Cram, for sure but I can't promise to know how to make it happen.

[Cramulus]

Okay, so this is all "nonprofessional" advice...

Style-wise, it looks kind of generic...  You're using the default fonts and headings, no? It looks like stuff was copied and pasted into a MS Word document... with a little love, people will be more likely to pick it up and read it through.

For the main bodies of each piece, I think you should go with a serif'd font. It's a bit easier to read for blocks of text. Garamond or Bookman would be my recommendation, definitely not Times New Roman.

Pick a cool font for headings (maybe one of these?)
Set the authors' names under the title in a smaller, sans-serif font

(BTW - if you're using MS Word, you don't have to change everything individually. Go to the Format menu, click Styles and Formattings, and you'll see all the document styles on the right. From there, you can modify the style and it'll affect each time it occurs during the piece.)

The Fail Whale Apocalypse badly needs line breaks.

On the internet, it's common to use a blank line to start a new paragraph. For printed text, indentation looks better.

The body might look slicker if it were justified. And as it's a "magazine", and an 8x11 page, things might look better in two columns.

The author bios would be better seated at the end of the author's piece.

The Introduction page has an extraneous semicolon after the word introduction.

You really shouldn't have three untitled pieces in the same booklet - as an editor, you're licensed to pick a title. If you're stuck, pick a word or phrase from the first sentence.

Statues and Cliffsides - the heading font is an irregular size

[Triple Zero]

On the internet, it's common to use a blank line to start a new paragraph. For printed text, indentation looks better.

I just picked up some random news papers, some don't even indent, just start on a new line. Hardly any of them use a blank line.

If you really want to, in Word "paragraph styles" (or something) you can set the paragraph spacing to half a line height. But no blank lines!

The body might look slicker if it were justified. And as it's a "magazine", and an 8x11 page, things might look better in two columns.

Personally I'd advise against justified lines. Especially if you also create columns, there's a good chance you'll get whitespace "rivers", that is, sometimes word spacing gets kind of big, and if that happens on consecutive lines, they will often visually line up and for large white empty blotches that are ugly and visually distracting.

That's probably clearer from the picture on this page: http://www.newsletterfillers.com/archives/design/river_runs_through_it.htm
(even though, those "rivers" are still quite subtle, they can get much worse with longer words).

Additionally I heard that people's eyes can track ragged edges more easily than flat justified ones, because it gives the eye some landmark to remember what line it was on. But this page says this theory is disputed, so you can go either way:

http://www.newsletterfillers.com/archives/design/river_runs_through_it.htm

Either way you choose, you need to pick a nice line length. For both ragged and justified goes that they look visually nicer with longer lines. But lines that are too long are hard to read. Generally anywhere between 45 and 75 characters (including spaces) is good, and 66 is considered optimal. At least that's what this site tells me: http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.2/

Also, blablablablabla. Sorry this is way too detailed and nitpicky advice.

Go with what Cram said, very solid advice. Just watch out for rivers and don't make your lines too short or too long.

You really shouldn't have three untitled pieces in the same booklet - as an editor, you're licensed to pick a title. If you're stuck, pick a word or phrase from the first sentence.

Please do this!

"Untitled" is a really crappy name for a piece, unless there's actually some self-referential reason why it's called like that. Or if it is a completely white painting.

[Placid Dingo]

I'll be doing the easier parts of this soon, but it is Novemeber; that means report cards and NaMoWriMo. So it will all get done in time, but if there's anyone willing to root around with the design elements and send it back to me, PM me and I'll send you a PDF or word file.

[Cramulus]

send me a word file, I'll poke at it

[Placid Dingo]

Cramulus@principiadiscordia.com?

[Cramulus]

check it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/71454024/Intermittens-The-Fail-Whale-Apocalypse-and-Other-Stories


what do you think?

[Cramulus]

feeling SEXAYYY

[Triple Zero]

check it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/71454024/Intermittens-The-Fail-Whale-Apocalypse-and-Other-Stories


what do you think?

I think it looks absolutely GORGEOUS!! Very well done!

Tiny nitpicks (though it's fine as it is, nothing is really critically wrong or anything)

- I like the way you put the mittens in Intermittens Though I wonder, why are the mittens translucent and striped?
- The horizontal lines in the TOC are broken in a semi random fashion. It's just tiny gaps, maybe they won't even show up in print.
- page 2, the URLs: in my opinion, you only underline URLs on an actual webpage when they're clickable. These look like URLs cause they're underlined, but I can't click them! This itches I would suggest using a subtle monospace font (Consolas is very nice and not too Courier-ish). Also do this with the URL in the last paragraph and the email address.
- Page 3, loving the huge title pages. Bet they look even awesomer in print.
- Page 5, you might want to shrink the paragraph indent spacing in half or so. See the break halfway the left column? It nearly breaks in two.
- Page 6, after "exaggerated", that's a really big whitespace river. You might try hyphenation. IIRC Word has a special character called the "shy hyphen", which is usually invisible, except when it happens to break a word over two lines. That way if you edit the text later on you won't get a hyp-hen half-way the line if they linebreaks move to other positions.
- Page 9, the italicised word "real" is not just italic, but also in a different (sans serif) typeface. Is that intentional? Because the italic variant of the current (serif) body font probably looks really nice, too.
- Same on Page 14, so I guess it's intentional.
- Page 16, last line. That's just ... unjustified.
- Page 17, Nigel's poem, a bit more line spacing?
- Page 18-21, Hoopla's Oxo piece, dashes before the the quotes look really weird. Also the italics are inconsistent.
- Page 22, "x files" should be "X Files" (or "X-Files"?) and probably italic since it's a title.
- Page 23, "Philip K Dick" should have a period after the K. Also the last line's justification is out of whack again.
- Page 24, quotes from a chatlog should probably be monospaced
- Page 31, the last section heading is orphaned.
- Page 32, a couple of last lines of sections are force-justified. Also on further pages in Cain's piece.
- Page 39, last line is a smaller font size?
- Koans of the Foolish Master has some force-justified paragraph endings again. Section "Lots" is set in the wrong font.
- Statues and Cliffsides has a light grey background? (also happened on page 3 btw) The font also changes halfway (you should probably change the first half to the serif body font)
- Page 59, grey background again. Dunno if this shows up in print, btw.
- Page 62, last line is wrong font
- Page 63-64, not sure if the double line spacing works here. Maybe use 1.5 line spacing?
- Page 77, force justification strikes again
- 78-1, the biographies are in a different serif font as the body, it looks like? (Bookman?) Use Monospace Consolas on the URL in Placid Dingo's bio, also it's blue. You might want to give the [redacted] in Dr Howl's bio a different style (italic, or sans-serif font)
- The last page is has page number 1. You might keep it though, it's kinda funny

Ok wow that's a lot of feedback I didn't expect it was so long!

But it is LONG!!

Great job! It looks absolutely stunning for the most part!

I would definitely reduce the indent at the paragraph starts somewhat, there's a lot of pages where it sort of makes the lines seemingly go all over the place.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It's beautiful!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It's beautiful!

TGG's gonna shit.

[Eater of Clowns]

This is pretty.  I think I'll have to make a trip to Kinko's.

Actually Cram, your incredible collection of materials I saw at the Meatup has me thinking I should start my own collection.

[Cramulus]

Tiny nitpicks (though it's fine as it is, nothing is really critically wrong or anything)

As always, feedback is 169% welcome and appreciated.

I've updated the PDF, check it!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/71454024/Intermittens-The-Fail-Whale-Apocalypse-and-Other-Stories

[Placid Dingo]

Thank you so so much everyone.

Will look this arvi. Can't believe how fast a meatspace copy came out.

Will update the file I uploaded so people using the old link still get the current versiOn.