Digital Foundations has shown up on the Pearson website.  Pearson is the parent company of Peachpit, which is the parent division of New Riders, which publishes the AIGA Design Press.  Its a mouthful.

Oh, yeah, we picked a cover!

The wiki, at wiki.Digital-Foundations.net is ready for editing. We have posted the table of contents and the first three chapters.  The chapters will be open for editing for two weeks. The plan is to post three chapters every two weeks.

You will need to create a user account and login (upper right hand corner of the page.)

We thank you in advance.

Here are the three first round sketches. Which one do you like best? Which one would you pick up in the bookstore? Which one would you assign in your class? Vote below, post comments to the post, or email additional feedback to authors AT digital-foundations DOT net.

If you are really hardcore, we have attached the Illustrator Files in a .zip file here.

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In reverse alphabetical order

#1, lowercase “f”

#2 Blocks

#3, All Text

#4 Tilted Rectangle

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Adobe CS3 All In One

by Golding/RaySam’s Teach Yourself SeriesDetails:

• The book covers the same programs we do, and adds Adobe Acrobat (who uses that?)
• Price: $34.99
• There is no included CD-ROM
• There are 16 chapters and an appendix, the reader has to get through 654 pages before reaching the index
• It is printed in black and white, only
• There are no inspirational or historic visual references (actually, there is no reference to any kind of history - I find this to be horribly scary)
• The book actually seems to “sell the software” as there is a section that explains various Adobe packages (apparently, the Sams readers wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use the Adobe website)
• Finally, I think it’s absolutely fine to judge these types of books by their covers - specifically, by their back covers. On the back cover, this book promotes its contents as such:”Design brochures” and “Develop an entire integrated ad campaign” are two of the (more interesting) bullets on the back cover. The book seems to be targeted towards amateurs who hope one day to be professionals. To these people I say, “Dear, dear amateurs, The Sams books will never make you professionals.” 

Adobe CS3 Bible

by Padova and Murdock (Wiley)

Details:

• The book covers the same programs we do, and adds Adobe Acrobat and Version Cue
• Price: $44.99
• There is no included CD-ROM
• There are 38 chapters, the reader has to get through 1235 pages before reaching the index
• It is printed in black and white, only
• There are no inspirational or historic visual references
• On the back cover, 3 out of the 9 bullet points that sell the book detail what will be learned with the phrase “New Features In…” This is a book about new bells and whistles in the Creative Suite. This book is not about core software methodologies.

 Adobe CS3 Design Premium for Dummies

by Smith and Smith (Wiley)

Details:

• The book covers the same programs we do, and adds Adobe Acrobat
• Price: $34.99
• There is no included CD-ROM
• The reader has to get through 754 pages before reaching the index
• It is printed in black and white, only
• There are no inspirational or historic visual references
• The book places InDesign as the first program to learn, before PhotoShop or Illustrator (just an interesting aside - who would ever teach InDesign FIRST?). This makes me wonder if the authors have ever actually created a printed publication from the perspective of a designer.
• The book does use icons for side-margin extras as follows: Tip (an arrow hitting a target), Remember (finger with a bow tied to it), Warning (a bomb!), Technical Stuff (an angular shaped face of, what I think is supposed to be, a male, not female, geek), Integration (a puzzle - this is for instances where the CS3 packages integrate within the text, ie. Use the bridge to open a file in Illustrator.
• On the back cover, this book promotes its contents with an area dedicated to bullet-pointing what the reader will learn how-to do. In the “how to” area, the word “use” and “work with” were listed 4 out of the 6 bullet points, and the words “understand” and “build” (in reference to websites) were used once. The words, “synthesize, demonstrate, inspire,” or “compose” were never used. The book is about production, not about synthesizing ideas and creating a foundation for a design practice.
  

A Yale law paper looking at Magic as a site of Intellectual Property “Negative Space” where innovation flourishes, rather than dies. (From Steve Lambert.) From the abstract:

Intellectual property scholars have begun to explore the curious dynamics of IP’s negative spaces, areas in which IP law offers scant protection for innovators, but where innovation nevertheless seems to thrive. Such negative spaces pose a puzzle for the traditional theory of IP, which holds that IP law is necessary to create incentives for innovation.

This paper presents a study of one such negative space which has so far garnered some curiosity but little sustained attention - the world of performing magicians. This paper argues that idiosyncratic dynamics among magicians make traditional copyright, patent, and trade secret law ill-suited to protecting magicians’ most valuable intellectual property. Yet, the paper further argues that the magic community has developed its own set of unique IP norms which effectively operate in law’s absence. The paper details the structure of these informal norms that protect the creation, dissemination, and performance of magic tricks. The paper also discusses broader implications for IP theory, suggesting that a norm-based approach may offer a promising explanation for the puzzling persistence of some of IP’s negative spaces.

NYT reports on a scheduled vote by Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty on whether to publish their work for free online.  All finished works would be available online through the University’s library. All scholars would have the option to opt-out of the automatic publishing.

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Here are some of the references we are looking at for Chapter design and page layout. We need it to stay somewhat standardized, in order to streamline the layout process (each page cannot be completely different - would take too long and would probably be disruptive to the flow of the chapters.)

We are working around a genre of software textbooks. They have instructions and screenshots. We will be adding better content, and additional visual references. But we will still have numbered steps and screenshots in part of the chapter. The best in class (design wise) is Adobe’s Classroom in a Book series:

We are particularly enamored of Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type, for its ability to mix teaching with history. And for showing over telling. She shows good design in the way the book is designed and laid out. Some of my favorite spreads are here (space and calmness at begging page, use of gutter as secondary information zone, symmetry and splitting the page up into quadrants, assymetry and splitting the page into quadrants):

Other points of reference are some of the layouts from Kimberly Elam’s Grid Systems

Also always relevant is Ellen Lupton and Abbot Miller’s, ABC of Bauhaus

These are some of the cover references we are working with.  The scanner wasn’t working, so I used the digital camera…

El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters designs for Merz:

George Grosz and John Heartfeld’s dada man / compass collage (circle triangle baseline):

Neil Gaiman has convinced his publisher to do one book as a free download for one month.  Not CC, but free.  If only for one month, is it free as in beer or free as in speech?  I would imagine Harper Collins is going to be tracking the downloads and sales stats.  I hope they publish the stats, and or publish a report on the stats etc.

One thing we’ve decided to do, as a small celebratory birthday thing is, initially for a month, make a book of mine available online, free, gratis and for nothing.

Which book, though…? Ah, that’s up to you.

What I want you to do is think — not about which of the books below is your favourite, but if you were giving one away to a friend who had never read anything of mine, what would it be? Where would you want them to start?

Julian Dibbell, noted journalist of all of the best and most interesting things Internet, has just published a solid rundown of some of the problems he has encountered in CC licensing his (99%) out of print book MY TINY LIFE. This is really useful to consider in terms of rights and permissions internationally. If it is going to be Creative Commons, it has to be Creative Commons internationally.

But once again I was getting ahead of myself. At the last minute it occurred to me to run a small question by Lessig that might, I figured, require some finessing: The rights that Henry Holt had returned to me were almost worldwide, but not quite. In the UK and Australia, the rights had been sold to 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Ltd., and there the book remained nominally in print and therefore out of my hands. Was there something I would have to do to the Creative Commons license, some tweak or another, to keep it from stepping on HarperCollins UK’s rights?

Well, no, said Larry. There was nothing I had to do because there was nothing I could do, not by tweaking the license at any rate. “The [CC] licenses cannot be geographically limited, so the conflict is real,” he wrote me. “You need a waiver from 4th Estate.”