Preflight Editing Your Magazine
Lesson 8 from: Create a Magazine with Blurb's InDesign PluginDan Milnor
Preflight Editing Your Magazine
Lesson 8 from: Create a Magazine with Blurb's InDesign PluginDan Milnor
Lessons
Lesson Info
Preflight Editing Your Magazine
Let's say that I'm ready to go. We've done everything. We're done. We're happy. I can hit Upload. Book is the next step in the process. Now what you're seeing here, this little window that prop popped up is called preflight. Preflight is a miracle, and it has saved me a 1,000, times. What preflight is doing is it's going through the document page by page, element by element. And it's saying I am double checking your work, Mr Milner, to make sure that you did not make a single mistake. I make mistakes all the time. I'm not joking about that. When I used in design and I'm designing stuff, I go through this preflight process over and over and over again because I get excited. I try to rush things and I make mistakes. I don't realize it, and the preflight is a safety net. It's literally going through every page, every element and saying I want to make sure that everything is cool if you've done something wrong, he made a mistake. Let's say, for example, you use an image that 72 d p I. And ...
it's not gonna print well, the preflight will say to you Look, you've made some minor mistakes and you've made some major mistakes. If you've made minor mistakes, it will sometimes let you get away with that. It will say, Look, it may not print great, but we're still gonna let this process go through. If you make a major mistake, let's say there's use an image and then you took that image on your desktop and you accidentally threw it away and the software is now looking for it and it can't find it. It's going to say we're not going to allow you to upload and print this book unless you fix this problem first and again. I've been caught 1000 times now when the preflight runs and in this particular case, I've chosen a publication that didn't have any mistakes. And it says to me Your book has passed the local preflight process. Your books, pdf files will now be open for you to review. After reviewing the files, please come back to in design and continue the upload process. So what this means is when the preflight runs on this on the actual publication and I'm gonna hit okay, what it does is it fabricates to Pdf's one of your cover document and one of your pages template. These pdf's are your another chance for you to make sure that you haven't made any mistakes. So what it's showing me here is a pdf. There's two different documents. There's a cover document in a pages document. So the cover document that we're looking at is a version of the first magazine that I made from the Siri's. And had I done the second magazine in the Siri's, it would have shown me this cover in the preview. So when I look at this preview, I take a quick look at it. I want to make sure that my bleeds air right that I'm not missing anything. And I think to myself, OK, this Pdf, this cover looks perfect. So I'm gonna go ahead and close that now I can scroll to my pages document and you'll notice that I'm looking at one page at a time, which is okay, but I prefer to look at the spreads themselves. So I'm gonna go up to view, and I'm gonna goto Work says continuous. I'm gonna go to two pages, and now I can see it as a spread. So again, I'm gonna scroll through here and I'm gonna say, OK, well, that spread looks OK. And this spread looks okay. And what I'm doing here, I'm gonna zoom in and I'm gonna look a where Micah Pioline's. I want to make sure that nothing is missing. I'm gonna check for typos, Do all these things that I should have done before This is going to give me another option to go to one more spread Zoom out. And I think, OK, this looks good. I think we're ready to go. So I'm gonna close that. And now the software's given me one MAWR option here. It says I'm satisfied and want to continue with the upload of my book. Or if I saw a mistake in those pdf's, I can cancel the upload, and I could go back and keep working. In this particular instance, I'm gonna go ahead and hit, upload the book, upload it is gonna ask me for my blurb sign on information, which is the same information that I would use if I was going to blurt dot com. So I'm gonna fill in this information. I'm gonna log in, and I'm gonna hit Upload. Now, we're not going to do the upload now, just for time saving purposes, your upload speed will be dependent on the size of your documents. So if you've created, like we talked about earlier, if you've created a 240 page magazine, you might have a relatively slow upload speed. It's a lot of content to upload Ah Little 20 page magazine or 80 page magazine like we're talking about here. It doesn't take long to upload, obviously dependent on your upload speed as well. But you're going to do that. And this is going to then upload to your author page on the blurb site, which is where I want to skip to now. So we've basically completely gone through this software in the sense of understanding the blurred book creator. And we've looked at basic nuts and bolts of how to craft a publication, how to create the documents for the publication, how to price that etcetera and then at some basic elements of design
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
This is one of the most interesting, informative, and accessible Creative Live classes I have yet seen in the five or six years I have been watching. Dan emphasizes the fun of the process and the importance of just getting started and being patient with one's progress. The aspect of this class that differs from so many "how to" courses is a clear way through production and distribution. I think many creators become stalled at the "how to begin" stage of real-world creativity, and Dan and Blurb provide an avenue through that sometimes hazy terrain.
Tessa Lauren
Thank you Dan and Creative Live! What a brilliant guide. I feel capable of jumping straight back into inDesign and can't wait to start self-publishing zines! - tessalauren.com (Photographer)
user-9eeff8
Clear and concise. Good course! Doesn't hurt that the instructor looks like Rob Lowe. ;) Worthwhile for anybody interested in an easy way to self-publish a magazine. I've used Blurb before for other projects (books) and it is indeed an easy-to-use platform.