[lore] Draft of the next edition

[Grahame Bowland]

On 16/08/06, David Basden <davidb at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Here are some attempts at constructive critisism.  Apologies for lack
> of spelling and grammer, and keep in mind i'm in a bitchy mood:
>
>         - If you're using Microsoft Publisher, please don't, otherwise,
>         it's easy to get a few of the pages to look better

I'm actually using Apple's Pages, which seems quite sensible. However,
I have very little experience using it, having only bought it
yesterday.

>         - Try to avoid overuse of boxes with line-borders around them,
>         and definately not next to each other. The ones you have, keep
>         at least 4-5mm from the box edges to any actual text, and don't
>         be afraid to bring any art closer to the edge. You're looking
>         to visually break up different items, and too many boxes make
>         that hard to do at a glance

Okay, that only seems to apply to the first page. Fixed, I think.

>         - Avoid font-crime. Too many fonts on the same page is pretty
>         ugly. Magazines ignore this because magazines have pictures of
>         hot girls/guys to distract from any other layout pain that might
>         exist. We need either soft-core pr0n, or fonts that don't look
>         like ComicSans.

Pretty much every single page is limited to one font for body text,
one font for the header, and one font for code excerpts. Not sure
where the crime is in that.

>         - If you're sticking with B5 or A5 size, be really careful with
>         a 3 column layout; you might have a hard time actually keeping
>         text readable through linebreaks. Maybe pick one of the Dr
>         Murphy responses and put it in a 2 column box inset. YMMV. Your
>         use of (differently formatted) reversed titles is a great; It's
>         standing out without too much eye pain. Your graphics placement
>         is great. Page 6 is a really good example of good layout without
>         needing boxes to deliniate stuff

I was actually going to go with A4 stapled for the format of this one.
It seems to have been the past format of Lore, and it's supposed to be
technical. B5 or A5 would both suck quite a bit to fit code into.

>         - Print stuff out on a laser printer. It's near impossible to
>         tell on-screen what something is going to look like on a smaller
>         or larger than A4 sheet, and what looks good on A4 might look
>         really hard to read, or overly cluttered on A5/B5

Yep, going to wander down to UCC and have a play in a bit.

>         - For thick dotted lines as rules, see above comments re: ms
>         publisher and pr0n.

There's only one of those and it's on the Dr. Murphy page.. does it
cause you that much pain? :P

>         - Your use of text wrapping around images, and background images
>         is great. If it's going to be printed or photocopied make sure
>         the shade of background images is around 20% of black, and that
>         you use a screen rather than relying on laser printer dithering
>         for all images to avoid images looking almost all black, almost
>         all white, or just crap. As Davyd mentioned, make sure that the
>         resolution is enough; ~150-200dpi for non-lineart, and higher
>         for lineart.

Well, I'll print it and see how it looks.

>         - Don't underline links and make them blue for printed text. The
>         centering on the bottom of page 3 is kinda weird, and might need
>         to be an inset box or something different to flow right. YMMV.

Yeah, it did that to me. It'd look okay for the online version, I'm
wondering if it's smart enough to differentiate when printing.
Probably not, will fix.

>         - Most importantly for text flow, make sure your hyphenation is
>         either done manually, or switched off altogether. The program
>         you're using is butchering your text with it. Try to use wider
>         columns for articles with bigger words so it flows better to
>         the eye.

Okay.

> More importantly, outright ignore any of these points if what I say if
> it looks crap, or i'm just being overly bitchy.
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
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