Willowgreen Publishing Catalog

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,
places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
[John Muir]

The 2005 and 2006 Willowgreen Publishing catalogs (above, left) were laid out in QuarkXpress. I used Adobe InDesign for the 2007 and 2008 layouts (above, right). The 2009 catalog (right) has recently shipped.

Every August, I look forward to this job. The owner of Willowgreen, Jim Miller, is a photographer so I have an endless supply of inspiring photographs from which to choose—a delight for a publication designer.

The Caregiver’s Book

The healthiest way to care for another is to care for yourself.
[James E. Miller]

The Caregiver’s Book, released September, 2008 by Willowgreen Publishing, is a second edition. As such, I tried to capture colors and design elements from the first edition so that the two printings would appear related. I changed the typography, overall size and images to be in keeping with other books recently published by Willowgreen. Jim Miller’s photography in this book is stunning.

This Time of Caregiving

Dreams are illustrations
from the book your soul is writing about you.
[Marsha Norman]

This Time of Caregiving is a book published by Willowgreen, Inc. in 2007. It has four-color printing on the coated cover, and one color printing (black) on the uncoated inside. This kept the unit cost low enough that the retail price could be kept under $5.00.

The author, James E. Miller, is also known for his nature photography and took the photo for the book cover. Since the uncoated paper on the inside pages would not present his photographs in the most effective manner, he decided to use a series of pencil illustrations instead. I used his photographs as resources when I rendered the drawings but altered them to fit the space where they were to be used.

Jim Miller produced a CD version (audio) and a DVD version (video) of this book in 2008. Since these are companion publications, I used the same color scheme and image for the packaging as I used for the book cover design. These products may be purchased at the Willowgreen website.

Kitchen Table Stories

As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices:
take it or leave it.
[Buddy Hackett]

This anthology of short stories and recipes is being assembled by The Story Circle Network. The book is 8.5x 8.5 inches and will be spiral bound.

The cover illustration started with the pencil drawing (right). The drawing was scanned and placed on a top layer in Adobe Photoshop with “multiply” applied to the layer. The color was then applied to layers below the drawing layer from front to back. For example, the apple tint is on the layer just below the drawing and the wall tint is on the first (bottom) layer. A flattened version of the tinted drawing was then positioned on the cover background in another Photoshop file. All of this was assembled in Adobe InDesign for the final CMYK printer file. Since the inside pages are one-color printing, a grayscale version of the drawing was also saved to use on the inside title page.

Publication Design

When you sell a man a book,
you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—
you sell him a whole new life.
[Christopher Morley]

These two 80-page, perfect bound books were printed in 4-color throughout to present the nature photography in its best light. Although the covers are similar in design, the visual layout and typography on the inside pages are different—each is styled to present the unique features of the written content to good advantage. The color profile used in the Photoshop preparation of the images was an important technical consideration. Some printing companies have a profile customized to their equipment while others suggest not assigning a profile—not color managing the document. These books are Willowgreen Publishing products.

The design for Starting Points, a Story Circle Network publication, presented an interesting design challenge. This book is sold through lulu.com, a company who writes this:

… Lulu is not a publisher. It’s a digital marketplace … [that] eliminates traditional entry barriers to publishing, and enables content creators and owners … to bring their work directly to their audience. First, they use Lulu’s tools to format their digital content. Then they take advantage of Lulu’s dedicated marketplace, custom storefronts and advanced listing and distribution services to make their books, [etc.] available to as many, or as few, people around the world as they like, earning 80% of all creator revenue…. read more>>

To market this book through Lulu, we designed the layout so that it could be sold as a downloadable PDF file, or ordered as a printed, spiral-bound book. The colored cover is used on the spiral-bound version. The one-color, PDF version is used as the inside pages. It includes a title page that doubles as a cover for the download orders.

Multimedia Packaging and Production

A lot of times when a package says, “Open Other End,”
I purposely open the end where it says that.
[George Carlin]

This audio CD was authored and produced by Willowgreen, Inc. When I designed the packaging, I selected one of the author’s photographs as the main element of the design. Since Disc Makers™ was going to manufacture the CD and packaging, I used their specifications and blank Adobe Illustrator templates when I assembled the layout. The wallet, which opens like a book, was 4-color printing and the CD label was silk screened.

This data CD contains a knitting pattern book published by A Time To Knit, LLC. In an attempt to make the contents of this book user friendly for both MacIntosh and PC users, I composed the content files in formats that use cross-platform applications. The readers can browse a number of pages using their internet browser (without having to be connected to the internet). When they find a pattern they like, they can select a link, open, and print a PDF file that contains specific instructions for that project. This allowed me to produce a full color version at a considerably lower unit cost than a 4-color book. It also allowed me to use audio clips and other features that can’t be included in a printed book.

I used Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign to prepare the book files. The packaging and CD were also manufactured by Disc Makers™. I must commend Disc Makers™ on their fine craftsmanship. Not only is the 4-color printing on the wallet excellent, but the 2-color silk screening on the CD is amazing—the fine lines are perfect.