Book on Alpine Architecture Finished

It's been many months of scanning, colour correction and drawing – just to get to the point where some page layout could begin. Finally the book is complete and has been handed over to the client for printing. I hope to see it in its final form within a few months.

Meanwhile, I've made a few pages available for viewing in Acrobat® format. Click below to take a peek. These pages are locked so that they won't print, which is only fair. The images have, of course, been resampled to low resolution for web viewing. In all, the project distilled down to 285 photographs and drawings. The photos were almost all "snapshops" taken by friends and craftsmen, rather than professionally derived transparencies. As a result, almost every image required excruciating repair from the years of laying about in some forgotten drawer with assorted rough or sticky objects.

The drawings were almost as time consuming, but more fun, as it had been many years since my architectural drafting days. Not only that, but these drawings were for explanation and demonstration rather than working drawings, so I got to take a little artistic license with them. But just a little.

An early draft of the book was presented to the Ambassoador of Austria, who happened to be visiting Vancouver. He seemed genuinely pleased with his Acrobat version on CD and artistically bound, colour laser prints. I have to say, the colour laser printers, when properly calibrated, are getting so incredibly good these days, that they sometimes fool even the pros.

The software used was Vuescan for scanning, Photoshop for the retouching, Illustrator 10 for the drawings, and InDesign 2.0 for page layout. InDesign was a dream to work with, but Illustrator 10 was noticably sluggish; slower even than version 8 running in Classic mode! InDesign performed like a champion, including the Table of Contents and Index.

We were fortunate enough to be workin with a real professional for a writer/editor, in the form of Monika Ullmann, of ProWord. Always nice to work with someone who knows her stuff!

To view a sample layout page, click here. To view an illustration sample, click here.

Be well, until next time, –Jeff