BASED ON A TRUE STORY The scriptorium (writing room) at the Abbey of Our Lady of Perpetual Wordage, 835 A.D.. Monks are seen diligently copying text into new volumes. The chief scribe, Brother Mark, is meeting with Brother John about the Abbot’s new book, which he hopes will become a new best-seller. Brother John has […]
A manuscript you submit to a publisher or literary agent will follow certain guidelines — plain fonts, black text on white paper, no fancy formatting, generous margins and double-spaced lines. Individual publishers have their own preferred submission format, which you’ll find quite easily on their website. Any of these apply when you submit to an […]
For a typical author, it’s all about the content. That’s as it should be. Creating a book of any kind, whether it’s a novel, a how-to, or a travel book, takes a tremendous amount of creativity, thought and hard work. The last thing an author wants to think about, usually, is the mechanics of production […]
I’ve mentioned before that it’s important to choose your typefaces (not “fonts,” which are particular styles, like bold or italic, of a given typeface) carefully and not simply accept the defaults offered by Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. This goes for your business letters and for your advertising, packaging and signage.
When I’m consulting with businesses about the “look” of their corporate communications, one of the hot questions is always, “Which font should we use?” In an earlier Creative Tips post I touched on this subject as far as saying “At least don’t use the defaults” without going into much detail as to how you would decide […]
There are some things you should never do when typing documents in Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or any other word processing app. Some of these avoidables may be deeply-ingrained habits. Some may invoke a cry of, “But I’ve always done it that way and nobody ever complained!” All of them will lead you down a slippery […]
Trade shows are an important way for many businesses to reach their audience and generate interest in their products, but they have an equally important downside: they’re a very expensive investment. Unless you can coax jaded, footsore show attendees into your display, you can’t even get a conversation started. And that can mean your big investment just […]
By now, if you read the last post, you’re starting to think that designers seems to place as much importance on the spaces around and between things as on the things themselves. And you’re right. One of the great concert pianists of the 20th Century once remarked that what defines a great performer is not […]
Space: it may well be the Final Frontier, because when it comes to documents it’s clear that it was never taught in high school. I think we were only ever flunked on content, and so we fixated on the text and forgot the page it was sitting on. When you write a letter, a proposal […]
To hear most Internet marketers and email marketers tell it, you’d think the only things that exist are the ‘Net and email. Snail mail? What’s that? But here in the real world, people who actually have to build successful companies know that’s not the whole story. Not by a long stretch.
