iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Louie Stowell @louiestowell.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

The History of Information by Chris Haughton is SO GOOD. Reading it slowly, a spread at a time, so I can reflect on it. Also I'm wondering how the publishers who are translating it handle pages like this...are the coloured dots on a different layer so you can move em around in translation I wonder?

We're looking at a photograph of a segment of the page of a children's book, The History of Information by Chris Haughton. It shows a simplified image of a face in matte black, with the brain shown in purple, against a bright pink background. Inside the brain a sentence is shown - "the man hit the rock" - broken into its constitutent parts of noun phrases and verb phrase. Each letter of the sentence has a series of dots above it which roughly match the length of each word...which would be tricky for a foreign publisher as their words would be different lengths, unless those dots are on a separate layer and moveable somehow?

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Sheila Pinder @sheilab01.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

How does that work in, say, German where the position of the verbs is so different?

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Sheila Pinder @sheilab01.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Oh my word. That's a co-edition nightmare.

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Nick G @lazylovelace.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Having been through this with two kids now I hope that other countries foster a love of reading at primary school rather than dismantling books into meaningless mechanics No slight on this book btw, it looks lovely

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Emma Price @tinymaster.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Having just handled an enormous amount of science diagrams for BBC Books, I can't imagine they'd be translating this in a meaningful way, without redoing the whole page? It's usually only the k plate (black ink) that gets updated for cost purposes, so it would only be the letters in this case?

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Louie Stowell @louiestowell.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

I love books that explain big ideas from first principles - whether for children or adults. In doing so you always have to make decisions about what knowledge is assumed to be shared, but the process of explanation of an idea while not assuming much knowledge can be revelatory.

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Louie Stowell @louiestowell.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

If working in colour publishing for 15 years taught me nothing else, it gave me an intense awareness of the pitfalls of translation vis a vis illustrations and indesign files. I have spent many an hour checking labels weren't on the colour layer...

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Karin Celestine @celestineandthehare.com · 20/11/2024

This looks amazing! And my publishers won’t let me put words in my photo illustrations for that reason!

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