[Leica] yearbooks

[Gene Duprey]

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 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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