This project was for Adobe Live UK on Monday 20th February 2023, and showed how to assemble the dust jacket for a hardback book in InDesign. If you missed it, then catch it on demand:

The cover illustration was made in Illustrator, and a couple of elements from Adobe Stock that were used as the basis but heavily modified. The Astute Graphics plugins "Texturino" and "Stipplism" were used to accentuate the paper-like look and feel of the elements outside of the heart.The type for the title was made using the font "Bonjour" from MyFonts.com and was modified in Illustrator with the Touch-Type Tool to make it look even more like brushed lettering before outlining.

The Monday show on Adobe Live UK is an hour long, and as is often the case, you do get the odd glitch while streaming. The old saying from showbiz relates to the problems that are likely to occur when you work with children or animals, but these days you could add software into that, when you're live! 🤣

In short, despite rehearsing the build, there were a couple of things that didn't quite make it into the stream.

First of all, for a better fit for the copy (text) I made an edit to the main paragraph style and bought down the size a little, along with the leading. I also adjusted the text on the flaps, including editing the text on the right-hand a bit to separate the titles from their description, and added a new style for the titles.

Secondly, while the light-coloured text has enough contrast to the top half of the pages, it becomes very hard to distinguish lower down the page, as the colours there are quite similar.

I used an old trick to get around this by adding an Outer Glow effect to the text. I kept it tight-in (1mm) and at a lower opacity but with the Multiply blend mode (the image below shows the options used and you can see the effect on the text in the left of that image. This technique does work but as with everything, it's always a good idea to run it by your repro/printer/print service provider just to make sure it fits in their processes.

Another thing that happened during the live was a problem with the PDF export of all of the spreads, and so I took a look at that after the stream. It took me a little while, but I found the culprit, and it was the large background file.

That file was an Illustrator file, using a gradient and multiple textures, that were causing the export process to fail (with no hint from the software at all) but as soon as I rendered the background out to a PSD and replaced the Illustrator file with that in the layout, the export worked as it should.

The Adobe Live community in the UK has a lot of regular viewers, many of whom have watched since right back at the start. They are all lovely people and they have come to expect "Easter Eggs" in my content, that they love to find.

In this project, they are "hidden in plain sight" in the text for the book jacket, with a lot of references to things from previous streams, my nickname "Tony Tangent" (actually Colonel Tony Tangent in full). and more. Why do I do this? Well, because it's fun, and actually gives me some text to work with, rather than using placeholder text—which makes it more "real-world" to work with.

Hope you like the project though and please do show an appreciation and follow me for more projects—I'm trying to increase the frequency of those!