Originally written by Paul Selkirk

I just finished reading all 275 messages (no exaggeration) that came to staff, staff-announce, corp, and pubs since Friday of the con. Y'all have a lot to say. This is my say. Crystal has already seen it, but I'm sending it to staff for archival/whatever. This is a brain dump, and I apologize in advance that it doesn't follow the template.

1. Souvenir Book

This was my fourth year doing SB, and I'm quite pleased with how it came out. There were no major problems, Krista and Crystal were right on top of things, the guest were pleasant and forthcoming when I dealt directly with them, and the printer did justice to the book.

1.1 GOH material

No problems. For the most part, I had everything I needed well before deadline. I would have liked to have a bio for Laura Anne, oh well. I also had to ping Eric for the video captures, but he came through in time. So kudos to Krista for staying on top of things, and to the guests for not being flakes.

I requested the following in August. We could start collecting this material much earlier; that's just when I got my butt into gear to say what I wanted.

1) Photo (all GOH) - 300 dpi black and white preferred, the larger, the better (up to about 7 megapixels), but I'll work with what I can get. It should be as close to the source as possible (digital camera file, or scan of a print), with no post-processing - we'll take care of that.

2) Artwork (AGOH only) - 300 dpi uncompressed TIFF preferred.

3) Appreciations - 1000-2000 words for WGOH, AGOH; 500-1000 words for others. This requires finding an articulate friend of the guest to write nice (insightful, funny) things about them.

4) Bios - nice to have if we can get them - 500 words.

5) Story (WGOH only). Again, 1000-2000 words is a good target.

6) Bibliography (WGOH only). Laura Anne has something on her website, but lacking full publication information.

7) Something else (FGOH). For Loony Labs, this was a game. For filk guests, it has been a song. Half page to one page.

Marrus gave us a lot of artwork to work with, which was great, and I used most of it. At her option, she FTP'd it directly to my PC, which took a couple tries and a couple hours. In the past, we've received a CD of artwork; archaic as physical data transfer may seem, it's pretty foolproof, and might be encouraged in the future.

Marrus also had concerns about her artwork leaking out onto the net. Here's what I said at the time. It's really common sense, but it's probably something that we should proactively state up front to our AGOH:

"WRT the handling of her intellectual property, let me briefly outline how I handle AGOH artwork. I keep copies of everything on my machine while I'm working on the book. Once it goes to press, anything I didn't use gets deleted. Pieces that *are* used in the book are archived together with the InDesign master file; all archives are kept under my control, and are only used if I should need to re-create the book. What gets circulated for review (and even what goes to the printer) is a PDF that is set to disable extracting images."

I should have added that the review/proofreading PDF has low-resolution graphics, and only the printer gets the high-resolution graphics.

1.2 Arisia material

President's message, conchair's message: I don't have anything to say about these. They said all the right things, and fit on the page.

A-to-Z: This was mostly written by Skip for last year's book. It does serve a function of highlighting the breadth of what happens at Arisia. However, if we're going to keep it in the book, it could stand to be completely overhauled and rewritten.

Program participant bios: These are pulled from Zambia, and massaged with a perl script and by hand. Like everything else in Zambia, there were many last-minute additions and changes (this is not a criticism of Tracy, Michael, or anyone else involved on the programming or database end of things, rather of the guest themselves). The bios needed more proofreading and editing than I had time for; many of these folk are professional writers, but they have editors for a reason.

Arisia policies: The same as last year, with minor edits.

Arisia staff list: This is always the last last last piece of the book to solidify, even after the deadline, well into the review cycle. It has always been thus, and thus it shall likely always be.

Arisia history: This is the last year it will all fit on one page, even at 7 point (5 point for conchair/officers and notes).

1.2 Ads

Helen Francini did a bang-up job on ads. In the past, when I've had to solicit ads myself, I've actively gone after the publishers, and let everyone else come to us. Helen sent out a lot more solicitations, which initially made me nervous, but she scored two publisher ads (one half-page color, and one full-page black and white), which made me happy.

The advertising ratio was about 25% of the interior of the book (including inside covers), which is just about right.

by size: 6 full page, 4 half, one quarter by category: 2 publisher, 8 cons, 1 group (fan rate)

1.3 Schedule/deadlines

I don't like padding the schedule, because then no one believes it (including me), and it all gets very fuzzy. I prefer to give people dates that I'd like things, and hard deadlines by which I have to have things, and stick to them.

Following are the deadlines I set for the book this year. The original delivery deadline was 1/7, but the printer wanted things a little earlier. They hadn't worked with us before, we hadn't worked with them before, they wanted a little padding for review and revisions, and, in the end, I needed the time for the working on the pocket program
anyway. So it was all okay.

11/26 SB ad reservation (7.5 weeks)
12/17 SB ad copy received (4.5 weeks)
12/24 SB final deadline for all content (3.5 weeks)
12/30 SB proof to concom for review (2.5 weeks)
1/4 SB delivered to printer (2 weeks)

2. Pocket Program

This was my first year on the PP, and I was also doing the SB, so things were both a bit rough and a bit rushed. However, I'm generally pleased with how it came out, and I look forward to doing it again.

Most of the content is drawn directly from Zambia, passed through one of several perl scripts, and imported into InDesign. There is very little manual formatting, and even less cut-and-paste. Over the next year, I need to get together with Tracy and company, refine some of the reports, and perhaps push some of the formatting back into the reports (e.g. for a nicer html version of the schedule).

Last year, Skip had a fairly contorted data path from Zambia to PP, but one thing he did right was to get more people involved in proof-reading the descriptions and bios earlier in the process. The little proofing I did happened on the fly, as I was putting the book together. I need to figure out a better and smoother way of getting proofing edits back into Zambia.

2.1 Contents/Organization

There were 2 pages of Quick Reference material (locations and hours of major functions and resources), 3 pages of GOH and Main Events, a bunch of pages of program item descriptions, 6 pages of foldout grids, 5 pages of Program Participant cross-reference, 2 pages of maps, and a fortuitously blank back cover/notes page.

Every page had a header, but some people I talked to managed to miss that the Art Show hours were inside the front cover, or the maps were inside the back cover, or some other major organizational detail. I'm thinking I might want to include a table of contents next year. Last year, Skip mandated bleed tabs on the front cover, and that may be a solution, but he had too many categories, and it muddied rather than clarified the waters.

2.2 Quick Reference

No problems here, as far as I know. If anything was missing or incorrect, it was only because I didn't have the data.

2.3 GOH and Main Events

The GOH events were culled from the schedule report by a simple search. However, I had to make some value judgements on what was a "main" event (Masquerade, Rocky Horror, and the like). It would helpful if these events could be flagged in the database. It's a minor thing, but it did take me a couple hours to put these pages together.

2.4 Schedule/Program Descriptions

The only complaints I heard here involved the icons, and the lack of a key for deciphering them.

The icons available in the font are:

projector 'F'   Film (unused this year)
projector 'V'   Video
projector 'A'   Anime (unused this year, due to extremely late data entry)
drama masks     Presentations
dice            Games
guitar          Concerts, filk
star            Fast Track
open book       Readings
crossed swords  Higgins Armory
television      Arisia TV (unused this year, due to no data entry)
easel           Art Show

I see two possible problems with the way the icons are used. First is that not every program item has an icon. The icons are generally assigned to program items that are not panel discussions (e.g. a gaming panel would not have an icon, but an actual game would). I wouldn't want to add a lot more icons, because that would create visual clutter, but I would at least like to come up with a good icon for the Main events (as featured on the GOH and Main Events pages) - things that will attract a significant portion of the membership.

The second problem is that the starburt icon for Fast Track is not immediately obvious. I think the others are clear, but this one is problematic. I didn't have time to font-hack this year, so I kept the same assignments that Rachel Mello did for the 05/06 pocket programs. For next year, I want to see if I can come up with something more obvious for the kids' stuff, and, if necessary, redesign some of the other icons. Failing all else, I may have to add a key.

2.2 Grids

The foldout grids worked well, and were a definite asset to the book, but had a measurable cost in both time and money. These pages had to be manually inserted, stapled, and trimmed, at 25 cents per operation, per book. $.75 per book times 2200 books is $1650, or about half the cost of the books, just to get the foldouts. Also, since these are manual operations, it added about 3 days to the production schedule.

I would never suggest dropping the grid, but for next year, I think we should consider printing the grid as a separate handout. The remaining book would be a little smaller (easier to bind), and could be machine bound and trimmed. We could deliver it to the printer a few days later, so we could include more of the last-minute program changes, which would in turn take some pressure off Newsletter. And we'd save money.

There were also a few comments about the organization of the grid. I'm thinking about how to cluster the rooms in the grid, to make their relative locations more apparent (e.g. Patriots hallway). I'm also considering whether to add some of the icons to either individual grid cells (e.g. Masquerade) or room names (e.g. Thomas Paine = gaming).

3. Pubs in General

3.1 Fonts

It's nice if we can make the various publications look at least somewhat similar, to look they they came from the same con, and I'm pleased that the Fontasia title font could be made to work for the restaurant guide and newsletter. However, I have to reiterate what I've told Skip in the past, which is that I pick the title font solely based on how it looks with the SB cover art. Since I didn't have a decision on what the cover art was going to be until September, the fliers, mailers, etc may have looked quite a bit different. I'm willing to live with that.

I noticed the badge at least used a different font and non-Marrus artwork, and I'm willing to live with that too, as long as it was deliberate, rather than someone waiting for artwork (I don't recall getting a request for Marrus artwork for the badge).

For next year, Bridget has already picked a font for the SB ad, and it seems a good match for Dave Seeley's artwork in general, so we should probably use that for fliers, mailers, etc, at least until the SB designer comes up with something even more kick-ass for the cover.

3.2 Fliers

From what little I saw, the fliers were weak this year, especially compared to something like Boskone (full-color glossy, yes, but also very attractively designed). I think we can and should do better.

3.3 Printer

Ambit Press was great to deal with. I was a little worried when I saw the Minuteman Press logo on their website, because we've had less than stellar results from consumer printer before, but they're a good professional business printer. We had a couple problems with the PP and its foldout pages, but I was able to talk with the sales guy and the pre-press guy, and get it worked out pretty quickly.

We should also get bids from them for the pre-con mailings (mass mailer, pre-reg packet), if we still do those.

3.4 Pickups

I don't know what the starting quantities were, but I counted the following leftovers at 2:30pm on Monday:

Souvenir Book           420
Pocket Program          100
Large Print PP          14
Braille PP              4
Restaurant Guide        300
Food truck menu         the whole fucking box

Note that I took home about 100 SB and 50 PP for personal archive/portfolio, so if you did a later count, you might think pickup was greater than it actually was.

4. Newsletter color toner usage

K       18% x   $39 =   $  7.02
C       71% x   $52 =   $ 36.92
M       97% x   $52 =   $ 50.44
Y       34% x   $52 =   $ 17.68
total                   $112.06

1424 color pages => $0.08/page (side) => $0.16/color newsletter