I will take a leap of faith and think that you haven’t yet grown tired of our Graphic Design Referenced posts here on Speak Up. In part, sure it helps promote it, but more than that I think having this relative transparency about the process of making a book is remotely interesting. At the very least, it is highly therapeutic for me to write about it. And today’s post, on Christmas Eve no less, couldn’t come at a better time and with the most satisfying of milestones completed. Around 3:00 pm today, after three months of 5:30 am alarms at UnderConsideration headquarters, Bryony and I have finished a) writing the more than 115,000 words that comprise the book and b) completed the first pass of laying out 400 pages (which Bryony, by the way, single handedly did) that need to accomodate more than 2,000 images.

Three binders with more than 1,500 grants of rights forms.

The last laundry list, sides A and B, of entries remaining to be written and images to be gathered. You may click on the images for bigger views if you are curious.

After submitting an initial chunk of text, somewhere around 75,000 words, in early August we still had a quarter of the book left to write. Of course, we had left the harder entries for the end, or those that we still didn’t have images for, so the last four months have been pretty grueling with the added pressure of running our blogs and maintaining our client deadlines. At one point, while I was doing one lecture every month, I found the hectic airports to be some of the most relaxing moments. Even Maya’s 2:00 am wake up calls were a proper diversion. This past month was complete overdrive in writing and designing, and somehow we managed to finish today. We’ve exported the massive PDF, will ship it online through FedEx Office and pick up a bound copy in Houston where we will be Holidaying with my parents so that we can review the pages. When it is all said and done, the book needs to go to the printer at the beginning of February and there is still plenty of work to do between now and then, but we’ve passed the biggest hurdle. And even though we are a little numb from all the work, we can sense some excitement somewhere within our tired brains.

Perhaps one thing that has kept us going, other than the deadline and the need to simply finish this, is a dummy that Rockport Publishers put together a few months ago. It sits in our shelf with our other reference books, serving as a kind of magic ball through which we can see the future of the book sitting in other people’s shelves. The dummy is an exact replica of what will be the finished product: 400 pages, Smythe sown so that it lays flat and, our favorite part, a plastic jacket printed in black that reveals the printed hardcover. It keeps us going. And we surely need it. After this first design pass we are finally seeing what will inhabit the blank pages of that dummy and we are surely biased but it looks pretty darn awesome. Hopefully it is.

And… exhale… I’m telling you, this is therapeutic. Happy holidays and the best for the new year to everyone.