Yeah, I’m a restless soul, always looking for change and variety. I suffer from wanderlust, and I can never be happy with the same blogskin for more than a few months. This new version of Bookworm has bright colors, a one hundred percent liquid layout AND rounded corners (requiring a little extra markup but who cares), and an old-fashioned sidebar with everthing in it. Although I do prefer the cleaner look of blogs that have links & archives tucked away on separate pages, or sidebars down on the bottom, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that it really is better to have that stuff where people can see it right away. (Do you agree? Disagree?)

I’ve also done a bit of housekeeping. I finally updated my blogroll to include some of the amazing bloggers I’ve discovered via the Salon and Weekly Geeks. I wish that list could be dynamically generated from my feed reader so that any time I subscribe to a blog it would automatically get listed here, too. Anyone know if that’s possible?

Anyway, I’d love your feedback on the new design. I work on a Mac and I have to do all my Internet Explorer testing via browsercam, which works pretty well but could be better. lt would be great if any of you IE users, especially IE 6 users (according to my stats that’s about 20% of you), could let me know if anything looks weird. And then go download Firefox. Let’s see if we can get that percentage down to zero! :)

We started by scanning the illustrations. Mekiah had drawn them in pencil, then used a lightbox to trace them over with ink. However, the pictures were not all the same size, and some had visible pencil or eraser marks. Leland and I spent a lot of time tweaking, resizing, and cleaning up the images. This was a good test of my Photoshop skills because with Leland sitting right next to me I felt like I had to be quick and efficient as well as accurate. I felt pretty smug when it occurred to me that I could get rid of a lot of the eraser marks simply by adjusting brightness and contrast.

Then we fired up InDesign and set up the master pages for the book. My font choice, Bell, was practically a no-brainer. Bell is perhaps my all-time favorite serif font, but I don’t find very many uses for it. It’s a little too quirky and beautiful for everyday use, and not as legible as I would like in smaller sizes. However, it’s perfectly suited for a children’s book, not just because of the larger size, but also because it’s reminiscent of Century Schoolbook, the quintessential children’s book font. Furthermore, the story partly takes place under the sea, and I thought that Bell’s elegant curves would reflect that very well.

Then the fun really began. Mekiah had worked with a professional artist, Anne Phillips, when he created the drawings. Leland, Anne, and I spent several afternoons crowded around my Mac, working out the composition of each page. Anne was fantastic. I learned so much from her. For the first time, I got to see Illustrator’s dreaded Pen Tool wielded by an expert. Not to mention a ton of keyboard shortcuts. And *cough* I showed her a couple of things in InDesign, too. Best of all, though, was the realization that the professional artist and I were speaking the same language and using the same methods — confirmation that my laboriously-acquired knowledge was legit.

And the most exciting moment of all? Leland might disagree, but for me, it was placing the bar code image on the back cover. I think it wasn’t until then that I really believed that there was going to be a real, true, actual book. Oh my goodness!

Throughout this process, of course, we were in contact with the printer, Bang Printing. We had some ups and downs along the way, for example, when there was some confusion about whether the book would be landscape- or portrait-oriented, and then when there was some confusion about whether the pages were supposed to be 10 or 10.5 inches wide. On the whole, however, I enjoyed working with them. They answered our questions quickly and helpfully, they finished the job on time, and the book looks great!

And what about the story? Well, I’ll tell you this: I think The Boy and the Shark is terrific. Kids and grownups seem to like it equally. It’s a fairy tale. It has sharks. And it was inspired by a historical event. Very cool.

We just recently went live with the companion website. Among other things, it describes the self-publishing process from his perspective. So, if you found this post interesting, you might want to check out his site, too.

Lessons learned:

• Rudiments of the Pen Tool and some keyboard shortcuts.
• Regarding the printer, get everything in writing. Send “just to confirm the details of our recent conversation” emails after every phone call.
• Do not sneer at self-published books. If Leland had gone the traditional route (he didn’t even consider it) there is no way he would have had this level of control over the finished product.

In honor of the new theme I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane, for those of you who have been reading this since the beginning (hi, Mom). And if you haven’t, maybe you’d like to see the old designs anyway.

Bookworm 1.0

I started blogging in December 2004 at Blogger, using the canned template called Scribe — the one that looks like old parchment. But of course I could never be satisfied with someone else’s design and I think it was around April or May of 2005 that I made my first custom skin. I kept the basic layout of Scribe intact because CSS positioning was way beyond me at the time, but I was able to tweak some canned clip art into a cute header. If you were around back then, you may recall the discussion about what color her socks should be. You know, except for the corner elements, I still like this one a lot.

Bookworm 2.0

Then I discovered stock.xchng. Wow, free stock photography! In one fell swoop I went from warm and casual to cool and formal:

Bookworm 3.0

I kept Bookworm 2 for quite a while. Then one day I was mucking around in the template, I forget why, and somehow I accidentally deleted it. I recreated it as best I could, but was never completely satisfied with Bookworm 2.1. Plus, I wanted to go back to warm and casual, which is more my style anyway. So I created Bookworm 3 with an Edward Gorey-ish font in shades of pistachio ice cream.

Come to think of it, that blogskin is still “live”; you can see it here.

Bookworm 4.0

Then I switched over to WordPress. If I recall correctly, my first theme here was Bookworm 3.1 — Edward Gorey in pistachio ice cream — rebuilt on top of the WP default theme.

Bookworm 4 came soon after. It was a pretty radical departure for me. One thing that has always bugged me about so many blogs (including my own) is great big long sidebars. They contain too much information and it’s just plain distracting. And blogs with two sidebars? Oh, don’t even get me started. So, for Bookworm 4 my goal was to have no sidebar at all. Just the posts, in a liquid layout with plenty of white space around it. And I stuck all the sidebar stuff down at the bottom. The header looked roughly like this:

Bookworm 5.0

I really liked the Bookworm 4 layout, but no one else did. Maybe it was too weird. I dunno. In any case, it didn’t last very long. I bowed under pressure and went back to a typical fixed-width layout with the Burne-Jones painting.

Bookworm 6.0

Now I’ve come back to casual clip art again. This one was canned too, but I brightened up the colors and made her hair look more like mine. Here’s the original. (Come to think of it, it’s a pretty fair representation of what my hair would look like if it were long and there was even the tiniest amount of moisture in the air. Which is why I wear it short.)

What pleases me most about Bookworm 6 is that — remember what I said about sidebars? Well this time I put all that stuff on separate pages. So now I have a lean, clean, non-distracting sidebar, and you have easy access to links and archives if you’re interested.

Developing the site was a blast. Leslie is a lovely person and a joy to work with. And she’s a Photoshop expert. She knew exactly how she wanted the site to look, right down to the specific rgb formulas for the image borders and text. She resized and optimized all the images herself, too. All I had to do was write the code. :)

The biggest issue we chewed over during the development phase was whether to give the site a fixed-width layout or keep it liquid. Our main concern was the home (gallery) page that shows thumbnails of all the photos. With a liquid layout and a wider screen you might be able to see four or five images in a row. Nice to use up all the available screen space. And nice to know that there would never be a horizontal scrollbar. On the other hand, with a fixed-width layout we could precisely regulate the order of the images. It would be a shame, for example, if Before and After didn’t end up side by side:

We did finally decide to go with the liquid layout, but it was a close call. This is what I love hate love hate love about the web. There are never any answers. It’s all a giant balancing act.

I will be rolling out a couple more new projects very soon, so stay tuned. And meanwhile (gotta plug it again), I hope you’ll pay a visit to leslieford.net.

Work is going very well. I finished a couple of blogs (here and here) and also this website, which was a lot of fun. Also finished a project that included a logo, letterhead, and four flyers for a nonprofit group in town — I’m doing their website too and I’ll post a link when it’s ready.

Steve and I did get to go out on a date this month. We went to see the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. It was SOOOO good! I think it just might be the best Bond movie of them all. Why? Because it was truest to the spirit of the original books. I read every single one of ‘em when I was, oh, 14 or so. (Thanks, Mom!) Like the “real” James, the one in the movie was not quite so suave, but very strong in the steely-gazed cold-blooded-killer department. James Bond was my first literary crush and I admit I still have fond feelings… ;)

Casino Royale fits in very well with the general trend I’ve noticed in the last few years — maybe it started with Harry Potter — the trend of making movies that are very faithful to the original book. A trend of which I wholeheartedly approve! To this day I am angry about certain movies that don’t do justice to the original. Mary Poppins springs to mind immediately. A fine movie, but bears no relation whatsoever to the book. (Any other fans of The Dancing Cow out there?) The Wizard of Oz, alas, is another. Why did they have to make it all just a dream?

Speaking of The Wizard of Oz, Lena has finished the Laura Ingalls books and moved on to the Oz books. I read a bunch of ‘em when I was in second grade, too. I wasn’t a huge fan, but my friend was, so I kept on reading. But Lena seems to like them, and if nothing else I’m glad she’s getting exposed to the cool Art Deco illustrations.

And I managed to do some reading this month, too. I’m well into my reread of Brothers K — and, happily, the edition I’ve got is a Penguin Classic, though ahead of schedule because I’m still technically in the A’s. This is only the second time I’ve read it. The first was back in college. I and my roommate walked around in a daze for weeks, muttering to each other: “Alyosha!” and “One onion!” Anyway, if you haven’t read it, please do. It’s positively…lush!

Also did my annual reread of The Dark is Rising, in honor of the Christmas season. I almost skipped it this year, because we’ve had NO SNOW. Temps in the mid-40′s. Green and brown everywhere. But such is the power of the printed word, once I started reading everything around me disappeared and there I was, shivering in Lady Greythorne’s mansion along with all the rest of the villagers.

I’m so happy to be back at my blog! I think I’ll end this post with a quote from Emily Dickinson. Can’t tell a lie: I didn’t just happen to know this; I got it off my new “The Reading Woman” calendar (Thanks, Joey!) — my new calendar which has many fine pictures of women reading but none of which are Katie Lewis — and of course the word frigate caught my eye immediately. Here it is:

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away

Nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry

Cheers, and Happy New Year to you all!