Hey! We wrote a book (kinda….)

..and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy!

After having watched a million movies and TV shows about authors and writers, I thought the hardest part about a book was getting the book reviewed and printed. Little did I know what we were getting into!

The final stages of the book was a lot of work, yes, but it wasn’t the hardest part at all. Anyone who is persistent will get that part done. The hard part is the actual writing and curation of the book.

You might be wondering, “Wait weren’t you designing for PNC, why do you randomly have a book?” Well this book is a compilation of all the work we’ve done this past semester. It contains everything from our insights, our design process, to the things we anticipate to work on this summer. We went down a long path creating this book, and I’m glad we started way ahead of time.

For all of you wondering how we created this book, the process went a little like this (loose interpretation, bear with me).

Creating an outline/structure

An outline can be a thought behind the start, middle and end of the book, or a very detailed list of topics. Ours was the latter. We created a book map of what every page would look like, and what topics we needed to write about.

Designing it

A book isn’t just a bunch of words. A book is a cover. A back-cover. The binding. And an interior.

Being in a design program, perhaps the hardest part of this entire process was designing the book! People judge a book by the cover and the readability. Else, nobody is going to bother going through it. It’s all about the Eye-Candy!

Storyline

Everything has a story. It has to have lows, highs, suspense, and something for the reader to look forward to. Else it won’t read well. It will read like an academic paper.

Curating everything

There’s a million pieces to a book. We had content, assets, visuals to create, ideas to generate. Basically a lot had to be created, and then curated to be put into this masterpiece.

Hitting “The Flow”

You then reach a point where the creative juices are flowing and you’re on your way to that first draft! YASSSSS.

Editing

Now is the “exciting” part, this long trail of adding and editing. We did several iterations of our book to keep re-evaluating, as well as refining along the way.

Revising…

There’s new ideas that come up along the way of editing, that need to be incorporated as you refine the rest!

Editing some more…

Andddd then you edit again. Forever.

Showing the work to our advisors

It’s always good to have a trusted source read your work for you. A second pair of eyes, that isn’t as attached to your work definitely helps! At several touchpoints in this process, we worked with our advisors to get feedback and iterate on our work.

Editing … yet again

Then you evaluate the feedback you get, and decide to incorporate it, or refine your work further.

Book-specific stuff

There’s this entire list of things that is very specific to writing a book, unlike an essay or something. Let me give you an example. I really didn’t know that the left page of a book has to be even numbered, while the right is odd. Facts like this just blew my mind.

Deciding on a book cover

It doesn’t sound like a big deal does it? But people tend to read a book by its cover. It took us a while as a team to have consensus on what cover would do our book the most justice.

Hating/Loving the book?

You get to a point where you kinda love the work you’ve produced, but it isn’t perfect. This is the time to let go, and realize you’re done!

Waiting forever

After what might seem like forever, you’re ready to get your work printed. Feels like forever, when the printing company keeps giving you samples and all you wanna do is see your work printed!

Finally printing

It was a glorious day, the book was here! Despite having to proof-read several times for the printing company, we were done!!!

Reading the book and loving it

Holding that book in our hands was very exciting. It felt great to finally have our piece of work in print, for everyone to see, and be proud of it.

Little words of wisdom as I leave here:

• Have an outline! This structure is crucial to having your thought process going.
• Start early, and iterate. Try to estimate the amount of time and resources that need to be put into this work.
• Get early feedback. Have another set of trusted eyes to discern what’s worth writing.
• Delete things, add new stuff. Never get too attached to a part of the work. Moving those old thoughts will make way for new ones.
• Set time aside to work on the book solely. Don’t just let the deadline pass. Deadlines are crucial to moving forward.
• Embrace failure. It’s hard for all of us, but its worth it!

All of this might sound intimidating, but hey here we are with a great book. We survived, and so can you :)

-Team Flux