I couldn’t keep a secret…
Hey, Shambot. Er…
Hello everyone! I was going to keep this a secret, but I figured it would be better to involve everyone so it’s not a selfish way for me to get you guys to like me (even more! :D)
I’m putting together a book of the best Shambot posts to date. At first I just wanted this project to be a way for me to practice my typography. I thought our blog is a good source of text and image so I was going to lay out a few spreads and play around with things. But I actually think it would be a super fun project for us all to come together and work on. I’ll be doing the layout of the book, but if you guys want to contribute photos, descriptions of older photos, drawings, maybe footnotes? (like what happened after this post was initially written) that would be really awesome.
Right now the images above are just some dummy spreads I put together. Although, I do like the cover since it is our logo/fav icon. The five names that I have in the ‘table of contents’ at this point were the authors of posts that were my initial pick. They weren’t necessarily my favorite but they all had a good amount of text and some cool images. For example, here is the spread I made for Ben (using the original title of the blog post):
It still needs a bit of work. I’m not sure how I feel about the images lining up directly with the grey box. But it feels like… kind of cool and hip to me. Not sure if that’s a universal feeling. You will also notice the comments section over on the right side!
If you guys are interested, I guess we need to go through and pick everyone’s favorite posts. Seeing as we all have quite a few pages of history, don’t go crazy with it. Just kind of browse around and let me know if you find anything that absolutely needs to be in the book. And when I say book, I do want to get this printed somehow. We can all have a copy and reflect on how cool we are. Maybe there could also be a bio section. Who we were when we first started the blog and what we’re up to now. INTERESTING.
Also, if we did a yearly collection HOW FRICKIN’ COOL WOULD THAT BE? I think everyone needs to start posting on Shambot MUCH more often. Me included. Then we’ll have more to choose from in the future for our anthology.
EDIT:// Help me write the intro thing on the table of contents! I’m bad with words. I forgot to change Cedar Rapids to Iowa City. Listing the cities might not even be important.
Ben wrote:
Yes yes yes!
I love it!
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 8:42 am | Permalink
Joel wrote:
I’ll make a blog for the book! Wait, crap, nevermind.
BILL THIS IS AN AWESOME IDEA AND I WANT THE BOOK NOW! I feel like if we can pull out the best and most interesting posts people outside of Shambot would be more interested. Is this a goal? Or is this something that would be just for us?
(neither is bad, it would just be nice to know if we’re our own audience)
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 8:48 am | Permalink
Emma wrote:
yesyesyyesyesyesyesyesy..
I nominate one or more of Katie’s hilarious New York posts, and my/your/our skymall post.
What happens with the images, though? Will this be a very small book? 150 DPI IS PRETTY SMALL.
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 1:56 pm | Permalink
Tim wrote:
Wow. This is a brilliant idea Bill! (And I love the designs!)
IT’S YEARBOOKS FOR US BIG KIDS! BITCHIN’!
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 2:10 pm | Permalink
Angie wrote:
HAHA, love that Tim! Yearbooks for big kids.
I totally love this bill!! For REAL.
Emma’s Shambot Warning needs to be included. But not my boob.
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 7:43 pm | Permalink
patrick wrote:
Great Idea! If only I wrote something worth publishing. Also, If you are publishing text, who will copy edit it?Also I love that there are comments there. Also my reCAPTCHA is “1975 existed.” DEEP.
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 8:50 pm | Permalink
patrick wrote:
Wow, I just used three also’s in the previous post. I know I tend to over use the word, but so many of them makes me sad. Also, it makes me depressed. =[
Posted on 10-Mar-09 at 8:53 pm | Permalink
Bill wrote:
yay! I think it will be worth the work to put this together.
Here’s a lot of stuff:
Joel: At this point I was planning on only printing enough so each person gets a copy. I’m not sure how expensive it will be in the end…
Emma: I’m not sure what to do about images. I think my draft of Ben’s post will work out, because I had to scale the images down quite a bit, and I bet they will look fine when printed at 300 dpi. However, half-toning each image also might work, and it looks cool too. Another option is to find original high res photographs… but that might be difficult.
Patrick: I think your one post about Fermi problems was really interesting! I think that one warrants an illustration to go along with it.
So do you guys have top favorite posts? They don’t have to be long either. Even just a post with a few words could be funny composed well on a page. So keep that in mind. I’m thinking maybe at the end of the book, there can be an index of all the photos posted. They could be small (so printing at 300 dpi won’t be an issue) and they could have captions! Like, where the photo was taken and the date or something. SO MANY OPTIONS FOR THIS BOOK!!!
To get things rolling. If there is any way we can all take some time and go through everyone’s posts, and pick a favorite that would be super helpful. And don’t be too crazy about it. Send me a list of your favs, then I can tally the scores and we’ll have our selected posts. This goes for READERS of shambot too! You know who you are!
Posted on 11-Mar-09 at 1:41 am | Permalink
Alex wrote:
I endorse this idea. I think this post should be the forward to the book.
Posted on 11-Mar-09 at 9:43 pm | Permalink
Allison wrote:
okay, i havent even commented on this post yet because IM SPEECHLESS. this is such a good idea that i dont even feel that i have to say so. except I will help, definitely. Bill, I think the cities are important to mention if only because of the fact that we have blogged on shambot from so many places in the last several years. like when katie was in ny, or when angie was in portland, or when i was in walker, mn doing the photo shoot. But, instead of listing where people blog from, maybe we can show a map and put dots on it, or something like that. Everyone would just have to make sure they tell you EVERYWHERE they have blogged from. but it could be cool…
i also like the idea of putting an illustration in the book to go with a text post, since we have some good ones of those, even if they were not originally posted with the text. We could even put images that were posted without text with the text without images AS IF WE WERE MATCHING THEM UP. That way, they won’t be lonely.
do it now!
Posted on 12-Mar-09 at 12:19 pm | Permalink
Allison wrote:
ALSO, I almost forgot to mention that you can make a Blurb book, Bill. That will be easiest because you can use their software to create the book and then “publish” it online so that everyone can purchase one if they want.
Super easy yo. and depending on which size/format you create the book in, you can purchase one for as little as like 12.99 I think? Look at it.
Posted on 12-Mar-09 at 12:30 pm | Permalink