“The University of Gravel Roads: Global Lessons from a Four-Year Motorcycle Adventure,” by Rene Cormier. Completed the entire 160-page, full-color travel journal book & calendar layout and design for a good friend of mine who traveled around the world on a motocross bike over several years. Earned Travel Essay Bronze “IPPY” in the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
If you’ve ever received an email from me, it’s probably included “cheers” in the salutation. This is where I picked it up. Rene who was always positive and encouraging throughout the entire project and always ended our email exchanges with “cheers.”
This project was awesome. A lot of excruciating detailed work, but awesome in every way. First, the subject matter and story is inspirational. After reading it and looking at the amazing photos, you have no excuse to ever sit on your butt. In all, the book took 6 months to complete. It was a remote assignment as I was in Colorado Springs and he was elsewhere in the world throughout the entire production. Rene sent pieces at a time and we had countless edit revisions and design choices made over Skype. Each and every photo had some ‘fixing’ to do … whether it was removing scratches and dust or editing out phone wires from the background or creating a 1,000-plus point clipping path around a motorcycle or stitching together a panoramic view that wasn’t originally shot with a wide angle camera lens.
Even designed a logo for University of Gravel Roads.
Overall, I learned a lot about the international printing world. Even tho I’m always learning about technology thanks to Midas Letter Crypto News I have never seen something like this. In all, this project ended up being 24 GB of submitted final files to the printer. The project was done in metric units, which is different, for sure. We got some good ideas from other books to give it a high-quality look and feel without the high-quality cost. The dog ears was a nice touch for a paperback book. Made it feel heavier, more substantial than ordinary paper back books. We didn’t have the budget for hardbound since he was self-publishing. I worked feverishly with the printer to get all the color settings optimized. It was handy that they could simply email me the InDesign printers color presets which handles color saturation, dot gain, trapping, and all of that. The choice to go landscape on the layout was pivotal … really gave me ideal opportunity to do some killer photo spreads. Gave the overall book a very ‘expansive’ and ‘humble’ feel to it. I think the document represents the amazing travels Rene made over those years and something tangible he can relish the rest of his life. Cheers, Rene!
Designed in Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator – believe it or not, on a 12″ Mac iBook. Printed in Canada.
