An afternoon of history with a Spanish professor

As she answered the phone, all that could be heard was a dog barking, followed by a breathless “hello?” Laughing, she apologized as she took care of the dog and returned to the call, lively in every word and excited for the interview. Rose Marie Beebe is a renowned Spanish professor and exceptional editor, and she knew how to make a nervous interviewer feel comfortable. Quite the combo.

Cover for La Mezcla.

“I was so thrilled with the work on the two magazines!” she said, referring to La Mezcla and Nuevos Caminos, the Spanish publications we produced last fall (which I wrote about here and here.

Not only was Rose Marie pleased, but she said her students delighted in them as well. “The kids held them as if they were some kind of archival documents,” she said. “They turned the pages as if they were wearing gloves.”

Rose Marie made sure she spoke of how much she enjoys working with Capital A Publications, praising Ariane for her accuracy and attention to detail. She admitted that one reason why she wanted to do the Spanish magazines was because it would give her the chance to work with Ariane again.

“The quality of the design, it’s Ariane,” she said. “I knew it would end up like that!”

Cover of volume 22, no. 1, 2005.

Before producing La Mezcla and Nuevos Caminos, Ariane had the chance to work closely with Rose Marie on a number of publications. The Boletín: The Journal of the California Mission Studies Association, was the first, a design project started at the Arthur H. Clark Company.

“That journal was my dream,” said Rose Marie. “I always wanted to publish a scholarly journal, and with the Boletín I was able to do that.”

The journal ran for ten issues before coming to an end. Rose Marie likened the Boletín to what she accomplished with her Spanish class. She talked of how it was so awesome to see her students really jazzed about writing.

“I wanted them to have something to hang on to,” Rose Marie said.

Cover of volume 25, no. 1, 2008.

Concerned with the students getting bored, she looked at the magazines as something to persuade students to really work hard and look forward to an end result.

“I thought if they were going to be critiquing one another’s work, they might invest themselves in it and try to take more pride,” Rose Marie said. “It really worked.”

Twice a week for two hours at a time, her students worked hard on essays, ads, and anything else they wanted to include in the publication. She described the laughter that surrounded her in the classroom, not because students were messing around or not working with a purpose, but because they were truly enjoying the writing process.

Cover of Nuevos Caminos.

“I take writing and publishing really, really, seriously,” Rose Marie said. “It’s a lot of work.”

Rose Marie watched as students’ Spanish improved because they had to pay close attention to what they were writing. She said she’s going to teach the class again, and she hopes the school will fund her project next time.

“Unfortunately I ended up eating the cost myself, but my husband—he’s so wonderful—he said, ‘we’ll do it this time,’” Rose Marie said. “I figured, OK, I’ll eat it and then I’ll have something to show the administration, so I can get funds in the future.” She called this strategy “proof of success.”

Though she does plan on continuing the class, she’ll be taking a year off to translate a five-volume memoir.

“I’m just smiling as I’m thinking about it,” Rose Marie said. “I love deciphering the handwriting and translating it into English.”

She said she feels like a detective sometimes, using tricks and tips she’s learned through the years.

Bilingual from the beginning

Rose Marie was born in San Jose, and has lived there her whole life. She grew up in a bilingual home as her mother is from Cuba. Her grandparents lived across the street and spoke only Spanish.

“I grew up learning Spanish, not knowing that was something some people didn’t know,” she said. “It was kind of nice.”

Rose Marie said her grandmother was her mentor, and a wonderful one at that. She taught Rose Marie how to read Spanish as well as speak the language. Rose Marie credits her grandmother for inspiring her to become a teacher.

After high school, Rose Marie attended Santa Clara University, then Stanford for her Ph.D. She was hired at Santa Clara right away when she graduated from Stanford and has been teaching since 1978.

“I really enjoy teaching and I like doing different things in class,” Rose Marie said. “I like to enjoy myself in the classroom, and they’ll [students] pick up on that and enjoy what we’re doing as well.”

In the beginning of her career at Santa Clara, Rose Marie met her husband, Bob Senkewicz. As a professor of history, Bob compliments Rose Marie very well in both their marriage and in their work. They’ve been working together since the nineties and have completed a number of books together.

“We collaborate on those two aspects [history and Spanish] and produce articles or books,” Rose Marie said. “We’ve moved into one another’s field through the years.”

Rose Marie said she believes they are a great pair. Bob speaks fluent Spanish, and she knows much more about history since working with him. She giggled when she admitted that Bob cannot get past a New York accent while speaking Spanish.

Previous collaborations

We also worked with Rose Marie on a collection of essays from a presentation that was given at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive–Library. The essays present new scholarship that is being done on Junípero Serra, a priest who was negatively portrayed because of his mistreatment of Indians.

Cover of "To Toil in that Vineyard of the Lord": Contemporary Scholarship on Junípero Serra.

“We’re trying to use primary source documents and let those words speak for themselves,” Rose Marie said. “He maybe didn’t always have a favorable view, but we’re trying not to be biased.”

Next Rose Marie and Bob worked on a documentary series, Early California Commentaries, that follows along the same lines as the previous essays. Their goal is to get primary documents accessible to scholars, researchers and anyone else interested in the topic. Pairing with that series is a monograph series, Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico, which is also published by the Arthur H. Clark Company and designed and typeset by Capital A. The first volume, Vineyards and Vaqueros: Indian Labor and the Economic Expansion of Southern California, 1771-1877. The second volume, Contest for California: From Spanish Colonization to the American Conquest, is expected to be printed soon.

“We’re trying to bring out new things,” Rose Marie said. “We’re trying to be cutting edge.”

Rose Marie mentioned seeing a review for Vineyards and Vaqueros in the fall 2011 issue of Southern California Quarterly, another Capital A publication for the Historical Society of Southern California. A review of the first volume of the Early California Commentaries series, with Anza to California, 1775-1776: The Journal of Pedro Font, O.F.M., ran in the winter 2011-2012 issue of the journal as well.

Rose Marie talked about going to a reading by the curator of history of the Oakland Museum. Her voice rose in delight as spoke of how the reader quoted from two of her books. “This is so cool; this is why we do what we do,” Rose Marie said. “People can get that primary source and use it in their research.”

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A Different Era

The dust jacket of Hellstorm

Most of the books that we work on here at Capital A cover the history of the exploration and development of the western United States from about 1830 to about 1880–the Oregon-California Trail, the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Indian Wars, the role of the Mormons, etc. We’ve done some Lewis and Clark, some California mission and pre–Spanish California works, a huge history of Los Angeles government, and others, but in general, we stick to a relatively small niche in the field of history. In the last couple of years, though, we have done a couple of books on World War II, one a reprint and one a new publication, Hellstorm by Thomas Goodrich. We’ve recently started on a third one, which will use the typeface that I wrote about here. It is our most complex book yet: 1,200 pages with lots of tables, sidebars, maps, and charts, as well as color photo sections and folding maps. It will not be released until 2013, but we’ll post some sample pages as the project gets further along–we are only at the early stages of galley proofs now!

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Library of Congress Has Us Covered

The Fall Overland Journal cover.

For the fall issue of OJ, we used another image from the Library of Congress for the cover. Since the the main article for this issue is “The Old Spanish Trail: John N. Macomb’s 1859 Expedition to the Canyonlands of the Colorado,” by Steven K. Madsen, we chose this one of Monument Valley, Arizona, by Carol M. Highsmith.

We are currently working on the winter issue and will have some progress to report soon!

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Beautiful books

The dust jacket for Dominic J. Pulera's Green, White, and Red.

Dominic Pulera, a former client (I designed his book Green, White and Red: The Italian-American Success Story a couple of years ago*), sent me a New York Times article, “Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers,” by Julie Bosman, this week. It bears an encouraging message to someone like me, who is in a business that is increasingly being encroached upon by e-books.**

The Arthur H. Clark Company, where I started my career and whose books I happily continue to work on today, built its business on rare and collectible books. As such, their books are very special: in addition to a distinctive design, they use very high-quality materials, such as acid-free paper, nice cloth or leather, and sewn bindings, so that they will not fall apart a hundred years later (literally! The company was founded in 1902.). Clark books are often put out in limited editions, bound in leather, numbered, and signed by the author, which makes them especially attractive to book collectors. I–and the company’s legions of fans–immensely appreciate this attention to detail.

A sample page of Green, White, and Red, just because I liked it so much.

I have continued using these quality materials in other books. An example is the mahogany Arrestox cloth used for the cover of Green, White, and Red–it takes foil stamping on the cover and spine beautifully and comes in a wide array of color choices, so coordinating with the colors on a dust jacket is easy. The cloth also is coated, so it resists tearing and abrading, and does not crumble with age. The book will look beautiful for decades to come (with or without the dust jacket, which don’t hold up as well)!

*This book’s cover features an image from the Library of Congress, whose collection I have previously written about here and here.

**I have no issue with e-books themselves, but rather with the publishers–Amazon, I am looking at you–who are basically selling poorly formatted, undesigned Word documents as books. I have a Kindle (bought so that I could test the e-book files that I created for another client) and definitely see the attraction, and reading designed pages is delightful. The problem, though, is the undesigned files, and the fact that there is no indication of design when buying an e-book from the Amazon store. I was disappointed to buy multiple e-books only to find inconsistent justification (both full justification and ragged right–who does that?), sporadic display fonts, and, unforgivably, widow lines. The main publisher who I do work for sells e-books that are still designed pages, in a PDF format that is low-resolution for on-screen use. Those, of course, are fantastic.

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Finalmente!

Front page of Travel section for La Mezcla.

We’ve been working with a whirlwind of Spanish the past couple of weeks. After much hard work, the files have been sent to the printer.

Santa Clara University professor Rose Marie Beebe, one of our favorite collaborators, asked us to put together a magazine-type publication of her Spanish class’s work from the fall semester. A total of thirteen students completed various works, including a travel essay, an advertisement, a book or movie review, a recipe, and a historical interview, to be included in the magazines.

We created two separate publications—La Mezcla and Nuevos Caminos. Within each publication, sections were divided by category. For example, the first section in both magazines is a travel section, as displayed above. Students provided photos to go along with what they wrote. Each section begins with a select photo or series of thumbnails and table of contents. The appearance of each section was unique, giving them a little different feel from one another while maintaining a consistent theme throughout.

A really fun portion of the work was designing the ads students had written. The things they were promoting were all very different and unique. This made playing with the layout a fun challenge. I’ll post an example later on.

No hablo español

I mentioned in a previous post the language barrier we faced. While working on this project was very fun and allowed us to get pretty creative, it was definitely a learning experience. I found it interesting that even though neither of us are fluent in Spanish, the layout and design process was not affected (besides changing the crucial hyphenation settings). It was amazing how little we needed to look up words or phrases.

El futuro

Sometime soon I hope to interview Rose Marie and get the inside scoop on the class. I’m sure she has some interesting facts about how she came up with the idea of the publication and what she hopes to accomplish by doing something of this sort for her students.

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Making Books Is Fun!

We are about to start doing some hand-binding for a small project, so I thought this look back at mid-twentieth-century typesetting and printing would be particularly timely.

(Via kottke.)

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Hablar en español, por favor

Do you speak Spanish? Neither of us here do (at least not very well). I took a few courses in high school and an upper-level course my freshman year in college, but without daily or even just weekly practice, all that memorization has faded. And now we’re working on magazines for two Spanish classes at Santa Clara University.

The students definitely know their foreign language–it shows in the multiple-page interviews they conducted and in their travel essays and movie reviews. Despite the language barrier, the articles are looking appropriate for each category: tasty pages of Spanish recipes, funky layouts for the advertisements, and the historical interviews have a classy look.

Deadlines for the magazine and a couple of lengthy books is sneaking ever-closer. Once the rush has passed, we’ll post some ideas we’ve brainstormed, as well as some shots of the bonita español magazine.

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Unfolding the Civil War with Disunion

The New York Times brings the Civil War—along with the memories and details pertaining to it—into focus on the war’s 150th anniversary through a blog, Disunion. Located in the Opinion pages, contributors to Disunion upload posts every couple of days to inform readers of another aspect or story of the war. Each entry is written chronologically as the fighting progressed.

One contributor, Adam Goodheart, found the blog to be a great way to relay the message of what went on during the Civil War in a realistic form, according to his interview with The Morning News. Goodheart thought that previous attempts through movies or television documentaries didn’t give civilians the perception of being a part of the occurrences as the blog does. Diary entries, letters, and images add reality to the blog.

Certain posts, like Recounting the Dead by J. David Hacker, focus on a historical analysis to provide readers with new information and more accurate statistics. Hacker’s post not only analyzes the number of people lost through incorrect hospital and prison reports, but goes on to explain the processes of identification of bodies. This, among a plethora of other posts, allows readers to catch an insider’s glimpse of life during the Civil War.

Be sure to check out this unique portrayal of our past!

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Opening up Pantone’s Color Box

Beautiful Pantone colors made beautiful business cards for Capital A.

So what sparked this explanation of the Pantone color-matching system? Cookies. Pantone chip cookies, beautifully crafted by a blogger and designer in need of Christmas gifts for her colleagues.

Detailed cookie making isn’t part of our plan for this fall, but the use of Pantone’s colors are. Capital A’s business cards feature PMS 3025, a lovely shade of teal, and 536, a complimentary light blue. Our mailing labels also use PMS 3025, with the name of the company accented by the same shade it is written in, but at a tint of somewhere near 75 percent. The use of one color in two or more tints can save a lot of money. Any publication would be smart to use Pantone for this reason and many more, but let me explain just what it is first.

Historically speaking

In 1963, Pantone founder Lawrence Herbert noted a huge problem with color consistency in the graphic art community. I’m sure he dreamed in rainbow before designing the template of colors known as the Pantone Matching System, a book of standardized color. Although there are many guides, the one most commonly used, and in our possession, is the Pantone 4-color solid-to-process guide.

Photo of the Pantone guide for the basic CMYK model. Photo courtesy of Sean Girard.

CMYK is a subtractive color model that refers to the four colors used in most color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key or black. The first three inks are keyed or aligned with the black plate. The colors are used in a fashion that subtracts from the white that is the background being printed on.

CMYK colors that are viewed on computer monitors, output devices, and printing presses can look different on screen than they do in print due to monitor and press variations. After a little experience with color inaccuracy in print, you’ll understand how helpful this is!

Keeping the pig in pigment

So why use Pantone? You can benefit from Pantone in so many ways (a lot of them dealing with minimizing stress) because you know your color is going to look great every time. There is no variation throughout the printing process. For example, if you are printing 10,000 copies, the color might not remain consistent throughout the run. Variations on the press can affect the way the colors look in the first 8,000 copies in comparison with the last 2,000.

Temperature and humidity can also affect press conditions. PMS colors guarantee consistent color even when influenced by outside elements as well as different types of paper. Swatch books allow users to know how their colors will turn out on coated, uncoated, and matte stock.

CMYK, when applied to a large, blank area, produces color in dots. If you look closely, the pattern is recognizable. Pantone diminishes this problem by making the color look smoother, without the dot pattern. Check out the back cover of a journal sometime and you’ll easily be able to find out whether it was printed with PMS or CMYK.

Capital A: tinkled pink by Pantone

Close-up photo of our use PMS colors on Capital A business cards.

Now that you know what Pantone is, and what they are capable of, you may be wondering why we are so intrigued. Remember those business cards I talked about? They were printed with only two colors, instead of the four colors that would have been used had they been printed with CMYK. Using less colors creates less expense for printing. And the mailing labels? Even though it looks as though there are two colors in the writing, there is only one. The emblem of the company is written in 100 percent color while the rest of the title was printed in 75 percent. When using more than one tint in the same color, it is considered one color. It’s like double-dipping with the knowledge that you’ll ALWAYS get away with it. So why not try it?

Pantone in InDesign

Screen shot of "swatches" panel.

PMS colors are easy to use in InDesign as well. Here is a quick demonstration on how to add them to your swatch panel.

Screen shot of box that allows you to change color mode.

First, click on the Swatches panel to expand your options. Then select the small gray box at the top right. The box has three horizontal lines and a down arrow on it. Clicking this will give you several options. Choose “New Color Swatch.” A new box will pop up in the center of your screen. Now choose from the drop-down list that will appear after you click on “Color Mode.”

Screen shot of our choice: PMS 3025

From the long list provided, choose “PANTONE solid to process.” This is where it gets fun. A very extensive list of colors appears. You can either choose the one that you like best visually, or choose a color by the number provided as a guide. In this demonstration I am choosing PMS 3025, the color used in our business cards. Once you have decided on your color, click OK to return to your document. After completing all of these steps, check out your swatches panel. Beneath CYMK and the other basics you should see the color you just chose, as you can see in this screen shot. See how easy InDesign has made using Pantone in all of our documents?

Pantone’s branches and buds

Not only does Pantone provide guides for the computer world, but they have expanded their industry to play a role in nearly every area of our lives. Their Fashion and Home division covers a fashion color report for each season, announcing predictions for the hottest colors of the year. Products in those colors are provided for interior design, apparel, dishes, and more. For fall 2011 be sure you don bamboo, cedar, deep teal, or phlox. As for the 2011 color of the year, honeysuckle, a vibrant shade of what you might call watermelon or plumeria or just simply pink, claimed the prize. According to the Pantone website, the color is encouraging and uplifting and will elevate your psyche. So get your honeysuckle on!

A line of Pantone paint was established in 2006, after beginning a partnership with Fine Paints of Europe. Over three thousand colors can be found in their paint section. Color families, colors by number, and extensive palettes can be found online to help you choose the right color for whatever it is that needs a coat of shine. The paint line has been helped interior gurus and designers match paint choices with Pantone’s home design options and accessories.

Next time you purchase Tupperware or cheap garden furniture, keep in mind that Pantone works with plastic as well. They have found ways to produce their colors in opaque and transparent forms so that corporations are able to reproduce their colors after selecting, specifying, and manufacturing their goods.

Corporate tools and guides

Pantone didn’t stop there. They continued to add to their resume, adding tools and guides for the corporate world as well.

Color Cue 2 is one of the newest inventions. It is a portable device that is programmed with Pantone color data. When placed next to any flat surface, the device will identify which Pantone color matches the closest with the shade in question. Interior designers have found the product very helpful in ensuring everything in their design is coordinated.

Retail stole the show for TheRightColor, a system that enables retailers to provide a color standard for their products. The consumer’s shopping experience has been improved by the use of colors that affect them positively. Another important aspect of TheRightColor is its ability to minimize merchandise returns due to inaccurate color representation. Dole, among other banana growers, has found Pantone useful in fruit sales. Pantone has developed banana guides with an array of shades a banana may turn within its span of deliciousness. The perfect color for bananas is “buttercup,” in case you choose to go this route!

Pantone fan. Photo courtesy of Sean Girard.

Pantone Universe is a hub for lifestyle products designed with the hottest colors of the season in mind. Whether you need a new couch and curtains, a car seat, or a pair of honeysuckle pumps, Pantone Universe has it. Shopping the Universe line couldn’t be complete without the Pantone shopping color guide. This panorama of colors fans out for easy use and keeps you from needing to wipe your brow during the exhausting process of shopping.

Three main software products have also been developed by Pantone, each directed toward graphic designers, pre-press professionals, business users, Web developers and even Internet surfers.

Powerhouse Pantone

It seems as though Pantone has accomplished all they could think of since 1963. But wait, here is one more tidbit. Pantone provides colors for corporate identity and assists any industry requiring color accuracy. The Pantone Color Institute researches and provides information about how to use colors, how colors affect people, and much more.

T-Mobile is a great example of the use of color as a corporate identity. In their disclaimer, they announce that their logo, including the color magenta (PMS Rhodamine Red) and gray (PMS Cool Gray 7), are registered trademarks of their company. It has caused quite the controversy! Take a look.

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Issue no. 1 of a new journal

Cover of Ghost Herder no. 1Seems like I’ve been posting a lot of covers lately! Here’s another one, for a new journal just published by the Friends of the Little Bighorn Battlefield, called Ghost Herder. The striking cover photo was taken by Bob Reece, the journal’s managing editor, and shows a sculpture at the battle site. This issue has a lot of really wonderful photography, both current and historical.

It has been several years since I last designed a new journal from scratch, and it was a really fun challenge to design pages that would make the most of the current text, yet remain flexible for articles in future issues. I had to make decisions about how to treat different-sized illustrations, where to place the captions, how the footnotes should look, and how to lay out the table of contents–the critical first page. The same principles applied to the cover design: it has to be able to adapt to portrait-oriented (as opposed to landscape-, as with the current cover) images, so I did several samples using different images as practice. (The masthead color will change with each new cover.)

Because it was a new publication, we were able to choose a size (8 x 10 inches) that would allow for bleeds, which means an image can go all the way to the edge of a page rather than leave a 3/16-inch margin of white, unprinted space on all sides–with the photos that the Friends editorial board came up with, I wanted to make them as big as possible!

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