Mark Boulton

A long time ago, two years ago in fact, I sort of announced I’d have a book ready the other side of Christ­mas. Ha! Embar­rass­ingly, that dead­line came and went as life, and work, got in the way. And, writ­ing a book, espe­cially a self-published book it turns out, is incred­ibly dif­fi­cult. But, a few months ago, this pro­ject has had new life breathed into it, and I’m pleased to say, the book will be avail­able on Feb­ru­ary 2^nd 2009 in PDF format.

Not much has changed

Dur­ing the last two years, the basic concept of the book hasn’t changed, even though the web has. This book is about prac­tical graphic design the­ory, and how you can apply it to the web. As I said back in 2006 (!) 

Like my Five Simple Steps art­icles, the book will be based on five steps you can work on to improve your design. These vary from very short and simple things like how to set a list cor­rectly, to how to design a com­plex, mod­u­lar grid sys­tem. They’re not meant to be a com­plete design les­son in the vary­ing fields. More like a refresher for those people who have design school­ing and a brief, prac­tical les­son for those who don’t. 

There’s a new website

We have a new web­site for the book: http://www.fivesimplesteps.co.uk. The release ver­sion of the site was beau­ti­fully built by Steven Teer­linck http://steventeerlinck.be using the Code­igniter frame­work. There’s some clever stuff in there for me to man­age send­ing coupons, timed dis­counts (eg a christ­mas sale period), and auto­mated PDF licence encoding. 

I’m going to be blog­ging about it a little bit as I go, but mostly, you can fol­low the pro­gress on Flickr, and Twit­ter.

Will there be a phys­ical book?

Over the past two years, and more recently, this ques­tion has been asked a lot. The short answer is yes, but it kind of depends on sales. I’d like to pro­duce a really spe­cial, beau­ti­ful lim­ited edi­tion hard­back. But, the thing is, it’s a con­sid­er­able invest­ment for even a run of 1000. That’s not includ­ing stor­age and ful­fil­ment. The plan is to have the PDF avail­able through Lulu for those who want it, but, as it’s a full col­our book, it prob­ably won’t be that cheap.

So, yes, I hope there will be a hard­back. I can’t wait to design a real, phys­ical book again. 

Can I still use my money-off voucher?

Yes you can. You’ll be emailed a unique code a few hours before the release of the book. 

So, that’s it. The pro­ject is not dead, it’s very alive and I’m work­ing fever­ishly to get it released in 9 weeks time. No doubt I’ll blog about it nearer the time anyway.