What it was like to be on "the design team"

Being on the design team was A LOT of work. I already had a base knowledge of working with the InDesign program, but I know that my team mate, Sam McGrath, spent a lot of time getting familiar with the program before we even started. InDesign was the program we used to compile the entire ebook, and I know that it's a great design program when you are completely familiar with it, but when you aren't, you confront of little quirks that sometimes turn into big frustrations.

Another program that was very helpful in our work was dropbox, which allowed us to compile all of the individual work that we were doing. I had never used it before, so I'm glad that I have come away with this familiarization of this online service.

To compile our book, we had to create a uniform style within InDesign to format all of the chapters. We had to create each chapter as a different file, because we didn't know the order of the chapters yet--this was kind of annoying considering we had to import paragraph and character styles for every new file. We also had to create our hyperlinks and what we hoped would have been an interactive table of contents. Unfortunately, this didn't happen because nothing we did would work the way we wanted to and we just didn't have enough time.

The hardest part about this process was that things that looked great on InDesign would for some reason look completely off in the epub format. This caused A LOT of grief. This is where a better knowledge and familiarization of InDesign would have been helpful. But I know that Sam shared a lot of tutorial videos that we would follow, and still not get the results we needed.

The moral of this story is that two weeks is not enough time at all to write, edit, compile, format, and publish a publication. It really taught us patience and skills in how to work effectively and skills on how not to throw the computer out the window after countless times of it not doing what we want.

I have to say that this experience wouldn't have been the same if I hadn't have had the chance to work with Sam and Ben Wagner. They were great to work with. They put in so much time into this project and they helped me learn so much.

I'm glad that I have come away with these skills now of working with InDesign and becoming more familiar with epub formatting. With the way things are going, it will definitely come in handy for the future. It also is rewarding to see your finished product. It also makes you feel giddy in a way to think that you have published something somewhere!