Update: My Illustrator CS2 Books

Wednesday morn­ing I deliv­ered my final drafts (“author review”) of the chap­ters I’m con­tribut­ing to Special Edition: Using Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Que, 2005). So, bar­ring any last minute changes to my illus­tra­tions and fig­ures, I’m done with that book.

All of my first drafts for Adobe Illustrator CS2 @work: Projects You Can Use on the Job (Sams, 2005) have passed through tech edit, where­in my good bud­dy Samuel J. Klein goes through my step-by-step how-tos look­ing for errors, leaps in log­ic, or con­fus­ing instruc­tion. About half are in final draft, being indexed and laid out. Two are still in copy edit­ing and devel­op­ment edit­ing (before I get them back for author review), and the rest I’m work­ing on now in author review.

What a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence it’s been work­ing with the two groups of edi­tors at Sams and Que. The entire process–both books–has been a tremen­dous edu­ca­tion into the process of book author­ing. I’ve designed and laid out books in my career, turn­ing word proces­sor tem­plates into Quark or PageMaker tem­plates and lay­outs (pre-InDesign days). But now I’ve seen the oth­er side of the process as well, from the writer’s stand­point and from the editor’s.

OK. Enough of a break. Back to edit­ing Chapter 4: “Designing Corporate Identity Material.”