GameSpite Quarterly 4 has arrived in press proof form. That’s great. Less great is the fact that this is very obviously a transitional issue once you look inside. The interiors have not turned out exactly as I’d hoped. The PDF workflow process worked out perfectly, with clean images and crisp text. So that’s not an issue. No, the problem is that InDesign handles type differently than BookSmart did, so the text is larger, more roomily spaced, and more crowded to the page edges than in previous volumes. It looks uncomfortably amateurish, and I’m disappointed… and while I could feasibly fix it, the process would take several weeks. So I hope you’ll simply except the slightly awkward interiors as a lesson learned, and rest in confidence that GameSpite Quarterly 5 will be perfect.
The book should be ready to go up for sale in about a week. I was hoping for Monday, but I have to beat both Mega Man 10 and Final Fantasy XIII over the weekend, so that kind of eats up any hopes I had for free time. The good news is that the issue’s text is excellent and should more than justify the wait and the slightly gawky layouts.
I thought the lawn gnome was going on the back cover?
Yes… a decision made after this test run had been sent to press.
I was worried this was going to have something to do with Andrew Koenig.
Ack, right. I should have read the earlier posts more carefully.
No worries, Parish. I’m one of those people who’s been holding off on ordering so I can get the last two or three GameSpites in one fell swoop, though I do know from the first “issue” (and the year one, volume one release) that the content will be awesome even if the copy editing and formatting isn’t perfect. Hmmm that sounded kind of petty and nitpicky, even though I didn’t mean it to…
“It looks uncomfortably amateurish, and I’m disappointed… and while I could feasibly fix it, the process would take several weeks.”
If it were me I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting people spend their money on it. Placed in the same situation, I would keep such opinions to myself and just hope nobody would say anything.
Are they letting you play MM10 on a Wii this time? I remember you having some trouble with the 360 build last time.
I think I would gladly read the text of GSQ #4 even if it was just sloppily tattooed onto a fat man’s ass.
Book in hand the only thing that bugs me about the layout is that the page numbers were apparently bumped off the bottom of the page.
Yeah, I overreacted when I posted this. It’s actually not bad, inside. Just not as elegant as I’d have liked.
The page numbers are missing because… I couldn’t figure out how to make InDesign paginate. By the time I figured it out, it was much too late to work them into the layouts.