LibriVox Forum

Designcrit -- I am completely blown away. It's gorgeous, elegant, perfect. I have not printed it, only looked at it on my screen.

If there are no objections, we could link to your PFD pack on the catalog page for The Waste Land. If you don't want to host the files yourself (or want us to host them in addition) I think we could easily keep them on archive or ibiblio.

My word. Please create more! Sure, you could create a new thread and post all your designs there, or post in each book's COMPLETED thread.

designcrit wrote:http://designcrit.blogspot.com/2006/06/waste-land.html

I've designed a package for T.S. Elliott's The Waste Land that uses only one-sided printing and fits all parts into a single PDF file. It includes a simple folded insert, tray card, and disc label. There's also credit and copyright language in small print on the tray card.

Click on the Waste Land image on my blog above to download.

Can some of you folks test drive and proofread this for me? Also, would it make more sense to post to the thread for this title? I had trouble using the search function and finding that thread.

Hugh, how should I proceed with other designs, and where should they end up? For now I'm posting my blog in the sig line.

I would suggest you make a wiki page for yourself, so you can list all of the designs you have available for people to use. Then people can just look at the list to see what there is. Also, it's a good idea to post in the projects thread that you've created a cover for the book. Look in the Completed section; threads go there when projects are cataloged and done.

Just sign up for an account at the wiki (http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/) To create a new page, type the way you want the URL to be (for example "http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/CDCovers) and it then click Create New Page when the page loads. Ta Da, there you have it

Thanks for the praise, kayray. You guys are fun to design for--I'm glad you like The Wase Land cover.

I do think I'll post a notice in the "complete" thread for Waste Land, but I'm not sure how creating a wiki would work. Can someone explain? I assume that is a system for "checking out" a title so nobody else designs it, right?

Also, it seems to me to be more logical to put the packaging with the audio files they're intended to package. Would that be possible? It might also be nice to have a small clickable thumbnail. Keeping copies on your server space at iBiblio would also be better in case my blog ever goes south. If the tech gurus at LV can manage that, just grab the file from my blog.

Also, it turns out we'll be going to New Orleans for the last week of June, so I'll take some sample CDs and try to get a face meeting with someone from the library who will accept a donation of audio books on CD

Thanks for the chance to work on this rewarding roject--I'm sure my students will be charged up about it as well!

The wiki is basically our help files section. Creating a wiki page is easy. Type in the wiki url, and add the text that you want the name of the page to be to the end. Load the page, and click the create new page link that will show. You don't have to use the wiki though, either. You could just start a new thread somewhere, and edit the first post of the thread to add new designs as you get them. Or you can just add them to the first post of this thread.

designcrit wrote:Also, it turns out we'll be going to New Orleans for the last week of June, so I'll take some sample CDs and try to get a face meeting with someone from the library who will accept a donation of audio books on CD

If you'd like more discs to take with you, I can make up a few (simply packaged) over the next few days and post them to you. PM me your address if you think it's a good idea. Otherwise, I'm OK to 'hold fire' for the time being.

David

re: wasteland, todd what a great design. simple, elegant, forceful.

re: designing more. I think we should start a thread in the "Other Projects" thread and let people sign up to do designs as they wish - Todd you could organize your class but others could jump in too, i know we have a few great designers here.

the problem will be managing this so that we can get designs onto the catalog pages - which would be ideal. Thumbnail from catalog page linked to pdf on ibiblio.

thoughts on this?

ps apologies if i am repeating what others have said already!

Yes, hugh, I think that all makes sense. 8) Thumbnails linked to PDFs available in the catalog beside the audio files. The designs should be open source too. I have students who might get in on this over summer break. But I think there needs to be a FAQ page and downloadable templates, otherwise the results may be very uneven. Creating small text in Photoshop is a nono, for instance. it makes for blurry unreadable prints. Careful use of white type on black backgrounds is a good idea for low-end printers too. I'm tweaking the Waste Land tray card for that.

Is there a more chatty person than I to moderate a "Cover Design" thread? Also, there should be a way for designers to reserve a title for designing. I guess that requires a wiki? It does seem we'll need someone with graphics experience to answer the many technical questions that will be generated. I'll be happy to chime in and answer a few questions.

Thanks to hugh and others for the warm reception to my first finished design. Stay tuned for Frankenstein, Grimm's fairy tales, and others. I'm doing a Constitution design for Americana Phonic in time for U.S. Independence Day. With our President bending the constitution daily, :x I'd like to ge that great document out there in an even more visible way.

As for the New Orleans donation idea, how about I find a person willing to recieve and catalog CDs during my trip before we start printing and burning? I'll start a new thread for this and ask folks to help as soon as I find the right library person.

Have a great week, all.

Why do we have to limit the covers to only one per title? If we are glad to get multiple recordings of the same work, why not multiple covers as well? I think it's a good idea to have a place to declare that you're going to do somethign specific, for those who dont' want to duplicate work, and to generally invite enthusiasm, but if we get more than one person that has their heart set on doing a specific title, I don't see us saying "No, sorry, that's been claimed already, you'll have to choose somethign else."

Yes! And someday we might be able to offer a choice of several full-color and B&W designs for every book!

What I can do is add some code to the stylesheet for our theme for the catalog that will allow you to insert a thumbnail image that looks like the one we have in call of the wild. This means we MCs (or just me) could add the CD covers thumbnails as they are created by putting a code like this...

Thanks kri, for tweaking the catalog to include thumbnails.

As for multiple covers for the same title, I though that with the size of the LV catalog we'd want to get them all "covered" before encouraging multiples. It takes hours and hours to do a complete design with a proper tracklist, credits, tray card, print-res images, and a face label. I imagine it will take quite awhile before the catalog has designs for everything.

I'm starting to think of other packaging problems too: One thing we may run into is file size limits that require 2-CD sets for some longer books. Maybe using DVD-Rs or burning smaller file sizes would help.

BTW, I've posted a final version for Leaves of Grass on my blog, so kri, maybe you can post a note to the person in charge of that and we can get a thumbnail in the catalog soon.

Here's a mockup of how we might add these to the catalog page.

http://librivox.org/leaves-of-grass-by-walt-whitman/

I've initiated a discussion among the other admins about possibly hosting the PDF files and thumbnails. For now I'm just linking to your files for illustration purposes.

designcrit wrote:I'm starting to think of other packaging problems too: One thing we may run into is file size limits that require 2-CD sets for some longer books. Maybe using DVD-Rs or burning smaller file sizes would help.

I noticed this problem when I created my origami CD cases for Call of the Wild to send to my friend. I had to create three because the files fit on three discs. Honestly the majority of our books will go on 2-4 discs, but this isn't dependent on the size of the files usually. Most people will be burning audio CDs, which generally allows you to burn 70-80 minutes on the disc. If you're creating labels you can just calculate roughly the amount of discs someone might use for that project based upon the number of files and their runtimes. Or, you could just create your CD label with a space to write in "Disc One" or "Disc Two", etc.

OK, so I uploaded the thumbnail and PDF to archive.org, and those are now the files that are linked to on the Leaves of Grass page.

Hello everyone -

I was directed to this thread by Anita. This project seems like a great idea. I've been peeking at your covers and they look great so far. I noticed that there have been some proposals to donate copies to the New Orleans Public Library. I thought that I could perhaps help with organization or delivery if anyone needs a contact down here. Also, has anyone contacted the NOPL about this yet? I'm sure that they'd love it.

http://nutrias.org/

This is their website if anyone is interested. I'd be happy to ask around about it, though.