Progress continues on the Presentation Zen book. In retrospect the writing was easy. What takes so long is the design of the book. When I submitted the proposal in the spring, Peachpit asked me to do the layout and design for the book as well as the back/front covers. The whole enchilada. It has turned out to be more complicated than I thought; there are just a million different things to keep in mind when preparing designs for print that we don't have to worry about in the online/display world. I've learned more about InDesign than I really wanted to. I have also discovered that I next need to write an entire book just on presentation design as that chapter could have gone on for 200 pages. We're already making plans to create a book in 2008 focused just on design principles and techniques with applications for presentation design (perhaps with a dvd) and I'll be producing a workbook just for the Japanese market in English for release in April with a Japanese publisher.

Getting there...
Here's where we are now on PZ: The text went through 2-3 rounds of revisions in Word with the editor in the summer (though I am still adding and cutting). I am now in the middle of submitting the layouts by chapter in PDF form (exported from InDesign) to the publisher and a proofreader checks the text and some in-house designers check the designs and offer up suggestions (they have great eyes!). The suggestions and corrections are sent back (placed on a server actually) and look like the pages below (the green boxes are the comments). Test InDesign files have been submitted too for the production people to test images and bleeds, colors, etc. This weekend all chapters will be completed and with the publisher for corrections. Then another round or two of corrections and final layout, and then sent to the production folks in PDF and InDesign with a ton of images. There was not room to include all that I planned to put in this book, so I'll put that online when I am done and can start writing for the PZ website again.



Below are the first 24 pages of the book. In the first two pages below you can see Guy Kawasaki's Foreword, the first Foreword ever (as far as I know) presented in the form of a printed PowerPoint deck.

               
 
iStockphoto deal
iStockphoto has been an enthusiastic supporter of the book (they'll be joining me at the Apple Store in Ginza December 11 (7:00pm) for an event as well). I'm a complete iStockphoto evangelist. The details are being worked out now, but if you buy the book you will get a special code entitling you to some free images and discounts from iStock. A special Presentation Zen page will be set up on iStockphoto too. I'll let you know the specifics when they are final.

Can't wait to get the book done so I can get back to blogging and "giving it away."