Blurb’s text pages are… meh. I’m not terribly happy with their restrictive layout choices. I’m going with teeny little columns (teeny because I want to set the book at 12 pt. type), three of them across the page, with photos interspersed as needed.

Having recently read a graphic design text book, I decided to try justifying the text, hyphenating as needed to keep the spaces between words from getting out of hand. This did not go as planned.

The columns are too small! Frequently I’d have to make word/sentence changes, and that combined with the almost constant hyphenation caused all my copy to read like… bad newspaper-ese. Looking at columns of text in a real newspaper today I noticed that the columns in the newspaper aren’t nearly as narrow as the Blurb book. Yeah, it looks nice if you hold it away from your face and squint, but what good is it looking good if it doesn’t read good?

So screw the pretentious graphic design, I’m running my copy ragged right, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.

Oh, one more thing, having to layout the book while writing for the first time is… time consuming. I spent 3-4 hours writing, editing, and laying out two pages. If I take an honest estimate of how many 3-4 hour blocks of free time I’m going to have in my immediate future, at this rate I’ll finish the book in October.