Cover Fun for #52 of Smith’s Monthly…
Five Short Stories and the Issue Cover…
I was having fun working on these covers, stopped for dinner, came back and my InDesign had blown a fuse.
Not kidding. It wanted me to sign up for a seven day free trial. Well, I had been using InDesign for decades. I tried everything, and considering this is Saturday, I was going to be out of luck until I could get help from Allyson and Josh at WMG on Monday.
But Kris convinced me on late Saturday night to call Allyson, that she was still up because Kris had just gotten a text from her on another matter. So I did and between Allyson and I we figured out that somehow the entire thing had gotten switched to a different email address which did not have an account. And after a little worry, we found my account email and old password and got in again to my account. And it still wouldn’t work. It seems that I was missing a bunch of fonts, so over to the InDesign library of fonts that are licensed and Allyson walked me through downloading fonts I needed.
Not sure what I ate at dinner that caused all this.
I felt really bad messing up Allyson’s Saturday evening, but she got me back up and running and here are the covers I did in two hours. And great fun after the stress of losing the system. (grin)
So Smith’s Monthly Issue #52 has five short stories and the cover of the issue (a spread) that I did. Four of the stories are in the Smith’s Stories format. Poker Boy stories have different branding. Here are the six covers, starting with the issue #52 cover.
4 Comments
Cheryl
Dean, I don’t know if this is something you’re interested in or not, but — well, you know how you feel about a agents and a lot of traditional publishers and all? Well, that’s how I came to feel about Adobe, after using their software for decades, too. A few years back I heard about Affinity’s software (one decent price, no cost for updates) and it seems to do all I need. They’ve got a ‘Publisher’ (layout) software, too. … affinity [dot] serif [dot] com …. For what it might be worth.
dwsmith
How do you get the licenses for your fonts?? Have you checked what they can be used for through that program?
Cheryl
I’ve a zillion fonts acquired over time (one folder shows ‘date modified’ in 1995) including old CDs of fonts (backed up) and more recent ones purchased from fontagraphers or sites like MyFonts — so all legit for commercial use per license. I just load them in the appropriate folder per my operating system and it’s available. (I freelanced and had a day job doing layout, web, all that good stuff; not so much any longer — hurray.) … Was so glad to find the Affinity products having gotten sick of Adobe’s bloaty tentacles and snitty attitude. … YMMV … Now, back to browsing the class listing pages…
dwsmith
Good, because so many writers don’t understand that fonts are copyright protected and just go using them without thinking, which is why I just tell people to get InDesign (I love it, by the way and been using is since it came into existence from Pagemaker) because they have the licensed font library and writers can’t get in trouble if they just use InDesign. Two writers I know had to pull down every one of their books because they used a knock-off cheaper design program and got taken to task with the fonts. Nasty copyright violations and it cost them not only money, but a ton of work.
Remember here I am working not with professional designers such as yourself, but people who just don’t know and think a cheaper program is better. Nope. Very rarely, actually.