billpalmer.net

This weekend I started page layout for the January issue, which is kind of odd because I don't yet have most of the articles and half the photos. So basically it's a series of title pages with stub photos and fake text, which looks beyond silly. But this time around I wanted to have the template for the issue in place before the content starts coming in, instead of the other way around. Someone emails me a picture for their article? I can just drop it into the appropriate page, instead of sitting on the photo and then trying to remember how far back into my iPhoto library it might be residing.

The beauty of using Pages, of course, is the ease with which you can turn a two page article into a four page article without interfering with the rest of the content, the ease of dragging various pages (or clusters of pages) around within the document when you decide to start re-ordering the magazine once you've got all your content in-house for the month. There were a couple of "are you kidding me?" moments with Pages while I was creating the December issue, but for the most part it was not only smooth sailing, but a full of pleasant surprises.

I now know who's going to be on the January cover, and you'll know in a couple of days. It's something I'm really, really happy about. Don't mean to leave you hanging, just can't reveal it quite yet. This issue's going to rock, though. We'll see what percentage of it manages to get produced before I head home for the holidays and how much of it will have to wait til just after Christmas, but we'll be releasing it on January 3rd one way or the other.