Content Tagged ‘pub lab’

The C-SPAN Cities Tour came right here to Wilmington to highlight our literary culture, including a segment focusing on the Pub Lab with the Lookout Practicum and director Emily Smith.

Check out the video here, and the rest of the segments too, including:

• Dana Sachs, “The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam”
• New Hanover County Library’s North Carolina History Room
• Literary Walking Tour of Wilmington with Old Books on Front Street Bookstore

UNCW has recently developed an affiliation with HarperCollins, the world’s second-largest English-language publisher, to provide opportunities for BFA and MFA students that are typically available only to students in NYC-based publishing programs. The mentoring program will pair individual students in two advanced book practicum courses (BFA and MFA) with senior publishing professionals at HarperCollins for regular Skype conversations to answer questions about the industry, provide post-graduation career advice and resume counseling, as well as additional networking opportunities with other publishing professionals, authors, and agents—both within and outside of HarperCollins.

For the first time yesterday, MFA and BFA students Skyped with Brian Perrin, Senior Director of Marketing for Harper Wave and Harper Business, and Sarah Murphy, Senior Editor at Harper Wave, about what they do, how they got where there are, and advice for students looking to break into the industry.

“Publishing has always been an industry learned by apprenticeship. Everyone working in it today is grateful for the time and mentoring they received and genuinely happy—eager, even—to give something back. We’re very much looking forward to sharing what we know about this crazy, frustrating, wonderful business with students at UNCW,” Perrin said.

HarperCollins staff also will visit campus periodically to participate in the department’s annual Writers’ Week programs and to serve as the biannual four-week visiting publishing professional, next slated for fall 2017. Publishing arts students also will be eligible to apply for HarperCollins New York-based internship programs, offered in spring, summer, and fall. As a general-interest, broad-based publisher with global operations, HarperCollins will be able to offer students connections to every facet of the book business, across all consumer book categories, according to each student’s specific interests. We’re so excited for what’s to come from the partnership!

For more information about the partnership and other goings-on at UNCW, check out this article in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

Much of the attention of students in the Publishing Laboratory is focused on designing digital and print media for both Ecotone and Lookout. The bones of our insight into design start with one acronym that’s as useful as it is fun to say: C.R.A.P. It stands for contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.

Our newest department—From the Drafting Table—aims to look at design in the world of publishing. For this debut post, I’ve decided to look at five cover designs from the literary journal Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies and talk about what makes them so compelling through the lens of C.R.A.P.

These first two covers take advantage of one very basic thing—color. If our courses in publishing have taught us anything about the business of the industry, it’s that a book or magazine cover needs to give a good first impression, even from far away. The vibrant background colors here catch our eye and hook us in visually. The white of the egg, in contrast to the rest of the cover, highlights the organic shape of the outline. Since blue and yellow are complementary colors, the yolk of the egg seems richer and tied to what’s behind it. The repetition of white tells our eyes where to make a connection, guiding our eye from the title of the journal to the food on display.

This next one does a great job expressing the journal’s mission in a subtle yet evocative way. While we might expect to find images of food on the cover of a food publication, a bottle of perfume or a hamburger made of wood might cause us to glance twice. Gastronomica’s goal of using “food as a starting point to probe timely and necessary questions about the role of food in everyday life,” shines through here. It’s not just food we’re looking at, but images that summon the idea of food while blending in other dynamics of life, connecting eating to being. This is a more conceptual take on repetition that allows the theme of food to reverberate through images and associations.

Another pigment match made in heaven can be seen in the red hues of the heart and the green background. These colors, aside from being the stars of that wintery holiday, are complementary. A contrast in texture is also at work here, the silky shadows in the fabric connect our eye to the fatty components in the salami and those hallowed-out dots in the meat bring us back to the cloth. Repetition hard at work.

The food is hanging on a little less in this one, but let’s face it, it’s cool. And there are some neat tricks at play here. The gradient of the background mimics the pixelated gradient of the sprinkles. They both have a gradual fade that makes the more consistent colors pop, like the sockets of the eyes and the shadow behind the jaw bone. It brings us to alignment, to that that nice horizon line where the colors start to part.The blue gradient in the background adds dimension to the cover by transitioning to white where the bottom of the skull begins. The image’s alignment with the backdrop, as well as its proximity to the horizon line, creates a bend that lets our eyes perceive the skull as sitting on a shelf rather than on a two-dimensional surface.

Gastronomica said good-bye to the glitzy and provocative stylings on display here and transitioned to a consistent patterned background. The change remains a mystery to me, I confess, but at least we still have these, and the new designs still provide clear instances of C.R.AP. Another pigment match made in heaven can be seen in the red hues of the heart and the green background. These colors, aside from being the stars of that wintery holiday, are P. Though the patterns vary, their size, rate of repetition, and proximity to one another reminds viewers of previous issues, telling them what they can expect and helping them to create an identity for the magazine.

That concludes our first edition of From the Drafting Table. Stay tuned for more thoughts about and examples of great design. And remember to keep C.R.A.P. in mind when looking at the world. There’s plenty to see.

–Jane Molinary, MFA Candidate, Pub Lab TA

Six of UNCW’s MFA candidates in creative writing get the opportunity to work as teaching assistants in our Publishing Laboratory during their three years in the program. They assist with all kinds of design projects–from spread design for Ecotone to posters and broadsides for readings and events. In addition to their writing, that work makes for a busy schedule. So we wanted to find out what they are reading, when they have the time to read. Here’s what three Pub Lab TAs have on their nightstands.

A friend of mine told me that the book he was reading had Colonel Sanders, Johnnie Walker, and a talking Siamese cat in it, so I asked him to mail it to me when he’s done. I finished Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore two days after opening it up. The book is cinematic, containing multiple themes that speak to you at once. It’s sad and visceral and stocked with human will. It will make you want to start speaking to inanimate objects and teach you how to forgive them when they don’t talk back. Plus there’s blood, all kinds of blood.

—Jane Molinary, Pub Lab TA, and MFA candidate

I am reading a collection of short stories called Mother Tongue, written by Karen Lee Boren. It is impossible to put down as character after character is assaulted by the complexity of life and how to exist in it. I find myself thinking of the characters as I drive, wash dishes, fold laundry, cook dinner, or any other activity that allows my mind to wander. It examines the beautiful violence that every day holds. Each story is uniquely engaging and surprising. The overall effect is the feeling that Boren took a magnifying glass to the female experience and laid the image bare on the page with the mastery of a poet.

—Renée Labonté, Pub Lab TA, and MFA candidate

Over winter break, I read Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See, while I traveled through Germany and Eastern Europe, where much of the story is set in the years surrounding World War II. The pages are full of music, and because one of the protagonists is blind, the descriptions are especially rich with sensory details. Doerr’s prose painted a sad yet human portrait of the cities I toured, illuminating the humanity in their dark history of Naziism, destruction, and intolerance. Despite its well-crafted plot and stunning language, the book, to me, had the nostalgic quality of those charming stories I read and become forever attached to in childhood, perhaps because the main characters are curious children.

—Morgan Davis, Pub Lab TA, and MFA candidate

Each year, the University of North Carolina hosts Writers’ Week, five days of workshops, panels, and readings where writers of local and national interest are invited to share their knowledge and work to students and Wilmington at large.

The Publishing Laboratory creates promotional materials including posters, the brochure, and (drum roll) commemorative broadsides! Heaps of them. Each writer provides an excerpt of their work and the Pub Lab’s six TAs then create a handheld design for audience members to take home after the nightly reading. Each broadside is a limited edition of forty prints that we produce right here in the lab.

Here’s what the process for creating a broadside looks like:

Getting acquainted with the work is key if we want to do it justice aesthetically. We read it many times. We brainstorm various adjectives, feelings, colors, and ideas that we associate with the work’s tone, language, form, mood etc.

We think.

We rummage through images in our brains, get inspired during walks, or while making coffee.

We get an idea! To make this idea perfect, we will need to make a dirty lip. We cover one of our lips with coffee (coffee looks more like dirt than dirt does, folks).

We take photos.

We import the photographs into Photoshop and NEVER forget to change the image mode to CMYK, to make sure the photo is saved at 300 dpi at the appropriate size, and to save the photograph as a tif.

We fail.

Undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in Book Building courses here at UNCW learn how to design, print, and bind their own chapbooks. They can use our perfect binder (cranky as she sometimes is), which holds pages together with hot glue, or they can stitch their books together with needle and thread. You probably don’t have a perfect binder like we do, but maybe you can think of a loved one who deserves a handmade book just the same. So we thought we’d share this step-by-step guide for creating your own chapbook and using the three-hole pamphlet stitch to bind it (sans, of course, the sentiments you will use to fill its pages–that’s up to you).

Supplies you’ll need:

• Paper for the interior: As many sheets and any type of paper that you want, but know that the more pages you include, the harder it will be to thread. I’m using 20lb white letter paper.
• Paper for the cover: One sheet the same size as your interior paper. You can decorate the cover with stamps, stickers, photographs, or anything else you like. I’m using 110lb white letter paper so the cover is heavier and thicker than the interior paper.
• Needle: Any size will work just fine
• Thread: While the Pub Lab prefers waxed thread, you can use any thread you’d like. The thread will be visible on the spine of the book, so think about how the color will complement your cover when you’re picking out thread.

Optional supplies:

• Bone folder
• Awl
• Paper trimmer

Step 1: Folding the Paper
Fold all of your paper in half. You can fold each sheet individually, or fold them all (including the cover) together. Folding each sheet separately gives you a crisper fold, especially if you use a bone folder to make a defined crease, but folding all of the sheets together will create a nice nested look for the pages while rounding out the spine. For this book, I folded all of the interior pages together, but folded the cover separately.

I know a behind-the-scenes look at Lookout should be, well, just that. You know, a sneaky behind-the-curtain glance. But for this post, we’ve found the spotlight! It’s not our fault: look at all these beautiful books!

The Publishing Laboratory is an enormous part of how Lookout Books ticks. It is home to bookbuilding and design courses, to computers with InDesign and Photoshop, to printers and scanners, to our glue binder and guillotine trimmer, and, of course, our ever-helpful Pub Lab TAs. We make so many things and spend so much time in the Pub Lab it’s easy to take it for granted.

Last week we were busy bees here in the Pub Lab! Edith Pearlman is coming to North Carolina for her tour soon (mid-April! Who’s ready?), and so we were getting together her press kits. They are so very beautiful, filled with reading guides, stickers, posters, Binocular Vision, and much more! All right, all right, enough ogling, it’s back to work for us!

– Sally J. Johnson, Lookout Intern

What We’re Reading :: Pub Lab Assistant Edition

The Lookout staff and interns wouldn’t accomplish much without the genius and faithfulness of the Publishing Laboratory teaching assistants. These lovely people actually know how to operate the scary machinery that makes our quality products, they keep track of where all our books are going, and so much more. In their honor, here’s a “What We’re Reading” that’s all about them!

“I am reading Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. It’s certainly not a fun read, but these days World War II history has a hold over me that I can’t shake. If the old adage ‘those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’ is true, I think the public should never stop looking at the events of WWII. That being said, the style of this particular book so far is pretty interesting, since it interweaves perspectives but follows one particular American soldier. Ink drawings, actually produced by that soldier, intersperse the sections and add some visual character to the book.”

– Lee Cannon, Publishing Laboratory Teaching Assistant

We interns are lucky for a number of reasons. One being: The Publishing Laboratory has THE best signs.

– Sally J. Johnson, Lookout Intern