[Leica] yearbooks

[richard at imagecraft.com (Richard Man)]

While Brian is retiring and may have time, I am the opposite end: returning
to corporate America so I don't have to worry about paying bills, which
paradoxically, may also mean that I will have more time.

One good news is that in the last few years, I have learned that Blurb has
a "magazine" option: letter size, soft cover and two choices of paper only,
but the cost is significantly less than the "real book" option. Best of
all, the color and BW reproduction are still Blurb-quality, meaning that
they are still being printed on the HP Indigo, just like that other ones,
and still take sRGB profile. Indeed, I have developed templates and
workflow to make process go a lot smoother. I have made 3 books using the
process, with the largest one being ~130 pages.

Brian's "150 hours on his yearbook" is probably not far off. My wife and I
probably put in 80-100 hours on the LUG yearbook that we produced, and we
didn't even have to do much color matching. We spent a lot of time
sequencing - which we felt would result in a stronger book,. The mechanic
of dropping the images in the templates is not hard, but tedious. With the
new workflow I developed, at least this part is easier.

If Brian has the time and energy to take this on, I am sure the result will
be tremendous. However, if he does not have time or energy this year, and
assuming my job situation sorts itself out sooner rather than later, and if
people are willing to trust me again, I will take the job for a 2019 LUG
Yearbook. More as it develops.


On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 3:58 PM Gene Duprey via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
wrote:

> I also enjoyed the LUG yearbooks and have missed them.
>
> Gene
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Aug 25, 2019, at 3:20 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 Heid
>  elberg 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.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Leica Users Group.
> > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>


-- 
// richard http://imagecraft.com
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