[Leica] yearbooks

[jbmmllug at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

Maybe one or two people noticed your color-matching and smiled quietly!

Or somebody will notice in the future.

I'd love to see the Yearbook happen again;  it would be super swell if you
find that you have the time and emotional energy to take it on yourself!

One plea for whoever may take it over: can we please please please have the
submissions happen after the turn of the year, so that pictures for the
entire calendar year are eligible?  For some reason the LUG Yearbook
convention was for the photo collection to happen before the year was over,
and I forgot that every single year because my mind rebelled at the notion
of it, and therefore it wouldn't stick in my memory and I kept being
surprised.



On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 4:20 PM Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
wrote:

> There has been sadness that the LUG yearbook has taken a hiatus.
>
> I think the problem is that very few people understand how much work and
> how much expertise is required to assemble a book like that and meet
> Leica image-quality standards. It sounds conceptually easy, but it is
> very hard to do a good job, and the standards of the existing yearbooks
> were set very high. Jim made it look easy. It wasn't.
>
> Jim Shulman had many years of experience doing yearbook-like things
> professionally. He was very good at it, and he knew exactly what he was
> up against when he first suggested the yearbook. High-end publication
> has not been at the center my career, but I've done maybe 20 or 25
> yearbook-like publications (annual reports, IPO prospectus, catalogs,
> etc) in the past few decades. Usually as part of my job, but a couple of
> years ago I published a 50th-Anniversary yearbook for my high school
> graduating class. Since the entire audience for that book was people
> whose opinion mattered to me, I reviewed my InDesign documentation,
> bought a new SpyderX, and poured my heart into it. I took 2 weeks of
> vacation time to finish it, and all in all I spent maybe 150 hours on
> that task. I had it printed by Lulu. It was excellent. But it was an
> insane amount of work. Probably no one else noticed that I color-matched
> the cover of the 50th-anniversary yearbook to the 1966 original. But I
> had to. Those Heidelberg Versafire digital presses will do whatever you
> tell them, but you have to tell them.
>
> I have no criticism of people who don't have the mixture of skill,
> experience, hardware, and spare time to finish a LUG yearbook. Things
> happen. And many people won't understand how much work it is until they
> get started.
>
> There is a chance that after I retire and sell my house and move
> somewhere smaller and cheaper and get enough sleep every night for 2
> weeks straight, that I might have enough time and energy to take the
> wheel of a reborn LUG yearbook. No promises, but I enjoyed the yearbook
> too.
>
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